Nationalism, Islamophobia and Social Media: An Analysis of Online Comments on Syrian Refugees in Quebec

This paper seeks to examine a singular configuration of the normalization of national belonging in the mode of worrying and racial governmentality regarding Muslim presence in Western societies. Public expressions of islamophobia tend to become commonplace in Quebec while islamophobia is regularly denied. These discourses are now widely deployed on social media. The study focuses on social debates concerning the Canadian Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative in the fall of 2015. What are the dominant representations of these refugees in digital discursive practices of “ordinary” members of the ethnic majority? How do these discourses take part in the reproduction of the national symbolic boundaries? Aiming to scrutinize articulations of nation, ethnicity and race, the study is based on critical theories of nationalism, race and whiteness, especially the work of Stuart Hall and Ghassan Hage.

The methodology is inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis and more specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach intended to unveil power and domination structures supporting homogenization and discrimination. The analysis is organized around discursive strategies and uses the concept of topoi to identity commonplaces associated with positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation and denial of racism. The data come from online comments published on the Facebook pages of the five largest media in Quebec. 15 articles on Syrian refugees and 1000 comments were analyzed.

Five discursive topics are identified, namely the topoi of number, fiscal burden, national responsibility, security and cultural threat. While overtly racists comments represent only a small minority, most users frame negatively the arrival of these refugees. Their reduction to the racialized figure of the Muslim is structuring since it largely constitutes the subtext of resentful nationalist arguments. Attributed muslimness cannot be separated from self-presentation of white nationals as victims of the hospitality and tolerance of political elites for strangers pictured as threatening and undeserving.