Abstract
This paper presents an analysis of how Hizbullah’s Secretary General Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah attempts to project an alternative reading to what it means to be Lebanese. For this purpose, a selection of his speeches following late Lebanese PM Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination in 2005 until shortly after Hizbullah’s defeat in the 2009 Lebanese parliamentary elections has been analyzed. This time period is of special interest as it entails Hizbullah’s shift from a primarily oppositional political player to one that actively seeks to be part of the national government and therefore has to appeal to a broad Lebanese audience, reaching far beyond its traditional constituents, Lebanon’s Shi'a.
For the analysis, an interdisciplinary approach was followed. Borrowing from linguistics, methodology from Interactional Sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis was combined, building upon Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of Dialogicality and Multivocality. Taking the indexical significance of language form for the construction of social meaning as a starting point, language choice was analyzed in relation to interactive frames and knowledge schema. In addition, looking into the employ of personal deixis proved to offer valuable insights into Nasrallah’s usage of intersubjectivity and positioning. The findings of this linguistic analysis were then put into context with insight gained from socio-political research on Hizbullah’s ideology, evolution and discourse.
Hereby, this study not only calls for a greater degree of interdisciplinarity in the analysis of political phenomena, but also aims to show that Nasrallah’s linguistic choices help him to project – or even sell – a specific version of what it means to be Lebanese. This very form of identity marketing, rather than being a uniting force across the fragmented Lebanese society, as claimed, effectively reinforces existing boundaries and widens the gap between them.
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