Biographical Subtleties and Subaltern Resistance Against Everyday Nationalism: Asylum-Seekers in Austria's "Megaphon"

Building on previous research (Karner 2007, 2011), this paper offers a qualitative analysis – underpinned by central concepts in critical discourse analysis (CDA) – of a form of speaking back to and resisting everyday nationalism/ racism. The discussion focuses on the Austrian monthly street magazine Megaphon, which is sold predominantly by asylum-seekers in towns and cities throughout Austria’s south-easterly region of Styria.  Megaphon’s central features include biographical accounts co-produced by asylum-seekers and local, Austrian authors. These monthly life stories condense the pre-migratory, migratory and post-migratory experiences of individual asylum-seekers for the Austrian/ Styrian public, thereby challenging many of the everyday stereotypes and “topoi” that define mainstream media representations of “the other” and of a growing “asylum crisis” in and far beyond Austria today.

Jointly produced by local writers and forced migrants, these accounts further avoid the kinds of “epistemic violence” (Spivak 1988) typical of many  a dominant discourse about subaltern others by members of dominant majorities. Instead, by offering “emancipatory” (Fraser 2012) registers of co-production involving both the relatively privileged and the structurally marginalised (Karner 2011), these monthly life histories provide powerful examples of the previously or otherwise silenced “coming into representation” (Hall 1989: 25).

This analysis draws on a large corpus of relevant materials: i.e. all Megaphon issues published since 2005. Further, it employs some of CDA’s most powerful conceptual tools – particularly those of the deixis, or “rhetorical pointing” (e.g. Billig 1995) for the purposes of reproducing boundaries, and of the topos, or “structure of argument” (e.g. Reisigl and Wodak 2001) – to demonstrate how the argumentative structures of nationalism/ racism are challenged by Megaphon’s counter-discourse. The latter is thereby shown to subvert nationalist stereotypes and exclusion through both its methods of production and circulation and through its linguistic-rhetorical features.