THE “RADICAL”, THE “ACTIVIST” AND THE HEGEMONIC NEWSPAPER ARTICULATION OF THE AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND FORESHORE AND SEABED CONFLICT
2008; Routledge; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14616700802374183
ISSN1469-9699
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Variation and Morphology
ResumoAbstract Popular assessments of the media treatment of the foreshore and seabed conflict point to a picture largely consistent with the well-established argument that mainstream Aotearoa New Zealand media function as hegemonic agents of the dominant Pakeha culture. This paper reflects on the hegemonic representation of the 2003/4 conflict over the "ownership" of the country's foreshore and seabed by examining specifically how two ideologically potent signifiers, "activist" and "radical", were articulated in a newspaper corpus of over one million words. Our theoretical and methodological approach is structured around a combination of macro- and micro-textual discourse analysis approaches. We justify our particular empirical focus by arguing that the controversy associated with the figures of the (predominantly Maori) radical and the activist can be regarded as both symptomatic and constitutive of wider race relations antagonisms. Our analysis examines the media-political significance of textual presences and absences and presents an overview of how all relevant lexical variants of activist and radical were articulated in our newspaper corpus. We also discuss the political significance of our findings, partly by briefly considering additional empirical evidence of how Maori identities were represented in the corpus. Keywords: activismcorpusforeshore and seabedhegemonyLaclauNew Zealand newspapersradicalism Acknowledgements Many thanks to Peter Berglez, Lincoln Dahlberg, Ruth Wodak and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. The core idea is based on an earlier conference paper (Phelan, 2006 Phelan , S. 2006 "The Medi … atized Antagonism of the New Zealand/Aotearoa 'Foreshore and Seabed' Conflict" , in: Online Proceedings of the British Political Studies Association 2006 Conference, Liberty, Security and the Challenge of Government, Reading , 4–6 April, http://www.psa.ac.uk/2006/pps/Phelan.pdf . [Google Scholar]). Notes 1. Pakeha typically denotes either European or non-Maori identities. 2. The ruling "departed from the previous understanding that the Crown [i.e. New Zealand State] owned the foreshore and seabed under the common law" and "opened the way for the High Court to declare that Maori common law rights in the foreshore and seabed still exist, and for the Maori Land Court to declare land to be customary land …" (Waitangi Tribunal, 2004 Waitangi Tribunal 2004 Report on the Crown's Foreshore and Seabed Policy , Wellington , http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/scripts/reports/reports/1071/00AEFB80-5FE0-4D2E-AD9E-0F45E36B91AE.p , accessed 4 February 2006 . [Google Scholar], p. xi) 3. Iwi is Maori for tribe or people. The particular legal case is best associated with Ngati [people of] Apa (Waitangi Tribunal, 2004 Waitangi Tribunal 2004 Report on the Crown's Foreshore and Seabed Policy , Wellington , http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/scripts/reports/reports/1071/00AEFB80-5FE0-4D2E-AD9E-0F45E36B91AE.p , accessed 4 February 2006 . [Google Scholar], p. xi). 4. The Waitangi Tribunal (2004 Waitangi Tribunal 2004 Report on the Crown's Foreshore and Seabed Policy , Wellington , http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/scripts/reports/reports/1071/00AEFB80-5FE0-4D2E-AD9E-0F45E36B91AE.p , accessed 4 February 2006 . [Google Scholar], p. 66) discusses the problems of representing nominally Maori perspectives through a monocultural Western discourse of land "ownership". 5. Halliday et al. (2004 Halliday, Michael A. K., Teubert, Wolfgang., Yallop, Colin and Cermakova, Anna. 2004. Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics, London: Continuum. [Google Scholar], p. 169) define lemma as "a form which represents different forms of a lexical entry in a dictionary, as with the English lemma bring representing brings, brings, bringing and brought". 6. The Oxford English Dictionary ( 2007 Oxford English Dictionary 2007 http://dictionary.oed.com/ , accessed 5 June 2007 . [Google Scholar] ) defines the noun radical as "an advocate of 'radical reform' … one who holds the most advanced views of political reform on democratic lines … one who belongs to the extreme section of a political party … a left-winger or revolutionary". 7. This preliminary section is structured around a summary textual analysis of how the signifiers are explicitly articulated in the work of Walker (2004 Walker , Ranganui 2004 Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: struggle without end , rev. edn , Auckland : Penguin . [Google Scholar]) and Wetherell and Potter (1992 Wetherell, Margaret and Potter, Jonathan. 1992. Mapping the Language of Racism: discourse and the legitimation of exploitation, New York: Colombia University Press. [Google Scholar]). King (2003 King, Michael. 2003. The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland: Penguin. [Google Scholar]) offers a good overview of the history and cultural politics of Aotearoa New Zealand more generally. Barclay and Liu (2003 Barclay, Kelly and Liu, James H. 2003. "Who Gets Voice? (Re)presentation of bicultural relations in New Zealand print media". New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 32(1): 3–12. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Abel (1997 Abel, Sue. 1997. Shaping the News: Waitangi Day on television, Auckland: Auckland University Press. [Google Scholar]) offer useful insights into how hegemonic conceptions of radicalism and activism colour mainstream media representation of bicultural political conflicts. 8. A discourse theoretical perspective (Glynos and Howarth, 2007 Glynos, Jason and Howarth, David. 2007. Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) on the "structure–agency" debate would stress how both structure and agent are co-constitutive of each other and always-already marked by a certain indeterminacy and lack. The conception of agency centring this paper assumes that one "cannot sever beings from the relational contexts in which they appear, and from the particular interpretations that constitute their meaning" (Glynos and Howarth, 2007 Glynos, Jason and Howarth, David. 2007. Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 160). 9. Our analysis does not make claims about the political-cultural discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand more generally. No doubt, in other contexts, it is feminists, environmentalists, socialists, trade unionists, etc. that are represented as radical and activist. 10. The software program used in the analysis was Wordsmith Tools (Scott, 1999 Scott, Mike. 1999. WordSmith Tools Help Manual, Version 3.0, Oxford: Mike Scott and Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 11. The coding of less explicit attributions was sometimes difficult. Some representations of the 2004 Hikoi made generic references to "radicals" that could be read as ethnically non-specific. In such cases, our coding schema internalises the hegemonic assumption that the Hikoi was a "Maori" event. 12. Turia left Labour in 2004 and later became co-leader of the Maori Party. 13. This assessment now seems ironic because of subsequent speculation about the Maori Party participating in coalition governments. 14. For example, one editorial articulates "radical" as a descriptor of Brash's political "courage" in questioning "separatist" orthodoxies (DP, 29 January 2004). 15. Many of the articles were easily coded, because the soft-copy version included explicit references to genre. Where doubt about the genre existed, the coding decision was discussed by both researchers. 16. The root word "active" (and the variant "actively") was not included in our sample, because we assumed it would have a more generic usage. 17. Interestingly, none of these 17 uses involves a duplicate press agency or intra-corporate report. The DP's reporter Gordon Thompson uses the phrases on seven different occasions. 18. English's argument should be contextualised. National criticised Labour's first draft of the foreshore and seabed legislation—which was subsequently renounced—because of its weak assertion of Crown sovereignty and commitment to placing "ownership" of the foreshore and seabed in the "public domain". 19. The Oxford English Dictionary ( 2007 Oxford English Dictionary 2007 http://dictionary.oed.com/ , accessed 5 June 2007 . [Google Scholar] ) defines activism as a "doctrine advocating energetic political action". Furthermore, consider the widespread reference to "conservative activists" in US political discourse.
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