Political Identity in Discourse

The Voices of New Zealand Voters

Jay M. Woodhams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030186296
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030186302
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book takes an innovative view of language and politics, charting the terrain of political identities and discourses in New Zealand through detailed linguistic analysis of interactions with its voters. The author first sets out the geographical and sociopolitical context, examining how the constraints of a small and isolated country interact with widespread social values such as egalitarianism. He then delves into the multiple nature of identities and explores how Kiwis form their political selves through informal talk with others and in engagement with their physical and discursive surroundings. In doing so, the author provides an in-depth exploration of New Zealand political culture, identity and discourse, and sheds light on how we use language to become political people. This book will be of interest to linguists, political scientists and sociologists working with discourse analysis.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jay M. WoodhamsPolitical Identity in Discoursehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18630-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Politics, Identity and Discourse

Jay M. Woodhams¹

(1)

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Jay M. Woodhams

End Abstract

Introduction

I sat, engrossed in conversation, at a table in the kitchen of a small flat in southern Czech Republic. Across from me was Lenka, a local businesswoman for whom I’d been teaching English for the past year. After a while listening to her talk about her daughter, her dogs and her work, our talk veered towards politics. Lenka spoke about how she had spent her childhood and adolescence in a communist state. She told me of secretly listening to Radio Free Europe, being forced to learn Russian, catching snippets of American movies in curtained rooms, and what it was like to grow up in a society of secret informants, state oppression and neighbourly suspicion. She leaned over the table, ready to impart to her teacher some hard-won Eastern-Bloc wisdom. She gritted her teeth and I readied myself, instinctively knowing what was coming next. ‘I hate communists. They should all be killed,’ she said.

I expected a smile to cross her face to ease the tension, but it never arrived. There was no trace of her wry humour that I looked forward to every week. She held my gaze for a few moments then looked down at the table, seemingly lost in thought, likely embarrassed at the sudden gravity of her statement. I was by then used to the somewhat stern demeanour of many of my Czech students, but this was different; after getting to know Lenka in our English conversation classes, the topic had raised a passion within her that no other had before.

While living and working in the post-communist country, once veiled by the Iron Curtain and now firmly within the embrace of capitalism and private enterprise, I noticed a common theme arising from conversations with my students, though not always expressed with Lenka’s vehemence: an overarching hatred of communism, a distrust of politicians and resignation to systemic political corruption. Colouring every interaction I had about politics in the Czech Republic was the country’s communist past. Many of my students were vocal in their reactions against the shackles of socialism, recalling stories of the suffocating burden of the state surveillance apparatus, the widespread distrust of authority and a childhood spent in a climate of fear and totalitarian oppression. Without exception, those who chose to talk about it rejected communism as a flawed experiment that trafficked in human suffering.

Anti-communist sentiment tended to arise most strongly in people aged around fifty, those who had early memories of the 1968 Prague Spring and resulting Warsaw Pact occupation, and who recounted to me tales of hearing the roar of invading aeroplane engines piercing the summer’s night. Despite the picture that was painted for me, the 2010 parliamentary elections, held while I was living in the country, told a different, and to many an infuriating, story: the KSČM, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, gained 11.3% of the parliamentary vote, winning 26 of the 200 lower house seats and retaining all seats they had gained in the 2006 election (Czech Statistical Office 2018).¹ I queried many Czechs, and most laid the blame at the feet of the older generation, folk who were nostalgic for past days of stability and employment and who felt threatened by the influx of foreigners, Western business and the corruption that results from sudden wealth and relative freedom.

Later I realised that such a consensus was likely reached because my students had sought me out to converse in English, a linguistic symbol of the West and a widely accepted passport to economic prosperity. A self-selected group had provided me a skewed interpretation of the political climate of the country. My interactions had been shaped by broader social influences, as English language proficiency had gained its own symbolic force in the Czech Republic, tied inextricably to the social and political context. English seemed to be a form of linguistic resistance to a communist past, particularly as the Russian language was once compulsory in schools across the country. English was one symbol of their commitment to freedom from tyranny.

Upon leaving the politically and historically complex state, armed with a host of experiences of political life in a country very much unlike my own, I returned home to New Zealand, a relatively stable democracy with arguably less political baggage. I began to reflect on my experiences, and asked myself: do we all define ourselves in relation to certain historical and social conditions? If so, how does it play out in New Zealand? Then, digging deeper, conscious of the fact that the influence of politics is felt in almost every aspect of our lives, I asked: how does the world around us shape us as political people?

This book seeks to provide answers to this question, examining how the ways we present ourselves as ‘political’ are structured in material and discursive contexts. It seeks to show that we are multifaceted political people; indeed, we are as complex as the structures that influence us. Remaining open and sensitive to such complexity can, hopefully, allow for a more objective, rational, critical and respectful discussion of politics and political identity.

Why Politics? Why Identity? Why Discourse?

We live in tumultuous political times, particularly so in light of the global rise of populism, political extremism and other threats to liberal democracy. Coupled with the apparent resurgence of authoritarian leadership and growing global clout of anti-democratic states, the current climate in the West appears to be one of uncertainty. Hence, the answer to the question ‘why politics?’ in these times appears self-evident. Politics pervades every aspect of our lives, depending on the definition one works with; from doing your supermarket shopping to registering your car to flying to another country to casting your ballot, politics influences the way we live, whether we care to engage with it or not.

The next question to answer is ‘why identity?’ Understanding ourselves is a quest that knows no end. This book will not address the most profound aspects of that question, yet hopefully it will shed some light on that tiny aspect of ourselves that we tend to call (or refuse to acknowledge as) ‘political’. This is a project important in the modern setting of fractured identity politics. Getting to know ourselves, and aspects of our identities as they are shaped by wider influences, can only serve to arm us against the hold of seductive and totalising ideologies that seek to treat our identities as uniform, mono-dimensional, shallow and easily co-opted in the service of ends that rarely mean well.

The last question, ‘why discourse?’, is simply because politics and its associated identities are embedded within the discursive, whether viewed through an interactional lens or as broader sociocultural phenomena. Political discourse analysis is a burgeoning field, and scholars have a wealth of data with which to contend. Discourse, in its widest sense, can influence or even constrain what we say. Thus, it is helpful to look at how individuals negotiate the constraints of discourse, exercising their agency and shaping discourses through their speech. In the contested arena of politics, discourse analysis is useful in helping to unpack the structures, relations and assumptions embedded within political talk.

In the face of such global political uncertainty one would be forgiven for questioning the country in focus throughout this book: Aotearoa New Zealand, one of the smaller Western democracies, a country with perhaps, depending on who you ask, a miniscule stake in the power plays of its much bigger relatives. New Zealanders, otherwise known as Kiwis, would likely be the first to object to such a description. They often like to say they ‘punch above their weight’ globally, evident in a ready-to-deploy list of achievers and world-firsts, alongside pride in their more solemn sacrifices on the battlefield, and later, in stabler global times, successes on the sports field. Kiwis are often portrayed as proud yet humble, and, having been considered the world’s ‘social laboratory’ at an early point in its history, a focus on New Zealand has the potential to serve again as a laboratory for understanding the nature of political identity in context.

New Zealand’s political system is modelled off that of its imperial parent, Great Britain, and the extrapolation of the insights presented in this book to its cousin Commonwealth nations is not as great a leap as one may imagine. Still, New Zealand is a unique place where its politics evolved alongside its social, historical and economic conditions. Despite this, the focus on language, a human universal, ensures that the patterns extracted from the analysis can help to illuminate the nature of structures that transcend the local conditions of their emergence and become relevant, like New Zealand strives to be, on the world stage.

The Voices of Voters

Political discourse is saturated with the voices of those who are given a stage to propagate their views. They are the politically powerful—the elite—and in democracies, they are elected in the name of the people. It is important to focus on what the powerful say, unpack the assumptions that pattern their speech and remain critical of and challenge inequity when it is leveraged by those who have a platform that average citizens are typically denied. Likewise, the media is an important object of focus, given its broad reach and influence. It is no surprise that political discourse analysis, then, tends to have its attention drawn to high-profile targets, such as extremists, populists, inspirational leaders and media ‘shock jocks’. Analysing their language stimulates the development of the critical tools necessary in an environment of tantalising ideologies ready to pull in the unaware.

On the other side of the coin are the people themselves, those who comprise the ‘politics-from-below’ (Fetzer 2013) that tends to be forgotten when listening only to those who speak the loudest. This book focuses on the voices of these voters, the people who receive political m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Politics, Identity and Discourse
• 2. Political Landscapes: Physical, Social and Historical
• 3. Egalitarianism and Politics in New Zealand
• 4. Subnational Discourses and Local Selves
• 5. ‘I’m a Greenie’: Stances of Political Self and Other
• 6. The Political Priest: Multiple Stances, Multiple Selves
• 7. The Voices of New Zealand Voters
• Back Matter