Narrating hostility, challenging hostile narratives

Abstract

The concept of hate speech as a speech against a particular community because of its (perceived) specific characteristics has been adopted in most Western countries, featuring in international and national legal frameworks as well as codes of conduct for media practitioners. With politicisation of ethnicity, religion and sexuality, enhanced by political, social and economic crises around the world, including migration, terrorism and violent extremism, it has recently become more salient, contested and divisive. Yet, as observed by Technau (this Special Issue), even if the expression is new, the concept itself is not. Various terms have been used to refer to the phenomenon; in the US context, for example, “race hate” was in use in the late 1920s and early 1930s, “group libel” in the 1940s, “bias crime” in the 1970s, with “racist speech” or “hate speech” becoming common in the 1980s” (Walker 1994: 8). Hate speech has been studied along racist discourse (van Dijk 1987, 1991, 1993, 2000), extreme right, populist and fascist discourses (Reisigl and Wodak