Mohamad Jamil, Siti Nurnadilla
(2022)
Negotiating racism in apologia during the pandemic: critical discourse analysis of comments on al Jazeera’s ‘locked up in Malaysia’s lockdown’ (2020) documentary.
In: 9th conference of the Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD), 6-8 July 2022, University of Bergamo, Italy..
(Unpublished)
Abstract
The Malaysian government’s perceived lack of empathy for the plight of migrant workers in Al-Jazeera’s ‘Locked Up in Malaysia’s Lockdown’ (2020) documentary was taken as a violation of normative values. Many opine that the discrimination, racism, xenophobia portrayed in the video were uncalled for – especially during the pandemic. Since its broadcast, it had not only received a strong reaction from the Malaysian government who dismissed the report on the treatment of migrant workers during the movement control order (MCO) as an ˜inaccurate, misleading, and unfair” (The Star, 7 July 2020), it had also elicited numerous repudiations from Malaysian citizens. This paper is concerned with the counter narratives occurred in the discourse of defense (i.e. apologia) in the comments on the documentary. It focuses on the discursive micro-level of online defense strategies against the construction of negative self- or in-group impressions (see also van Dijk, 1992, p.92). In this paper, I approached apologia as argumentation, i.e. persuasive narrative that attempts to alter, mitigate and situate the interpretation of the alleged act. This study answers the following questions: What were the defining characteristics, the range and severity of such counter narratives? On what grounds were the migrant workers and Malaysians categorized, and how were they related to each other?
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