A "modern partnership of equals" between former colonial powers and former colonies ? An analysis of agentivity in official speeches and social media reactions produced in the context of visits by European monarchs to their former colonies

Details

Supervisors

De Cock, Barbara

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en linguistique, à finalité spécialisée: Linguistics and its Applications for a Multilingual Society

Abstract

enThis work investigates the representation of postcolonial relationships in discourses produced on the occasion of recent visits by monarchs of former colonial powers to one of their country’s former colony (i.e. the Belgian king Philip’s visit to the DRC in 2022, the British king Charles III’s visit to Kenya in 2023 and the Spanish king Felipe VI’s visit to Puerto Rico in 2022). More specifically, it analyses the discursive construction of the image of the former colonial power (FCP) and the former colony (FC) in official speeches pronounced by these monarchs during the visit, and in reactions to the visit written on the social media by members of the FC. These representations are approached from the perspective of agentivity, defined by De Cock & Michaud Maturana (2014) as the “causal relation between an agent entity, an intentional action and the state of who is affected by the effects of the action”. Combining a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of three parameters related to agentivity (semantic roles, syntactic functions and syntactic positions), it draws different comparisons: i) between the representation of the FCP vs. the FC, ii) between their representation when discussing the colonial past vs. later periods, iii) between monarchs’ discourse and social media discourse, and iv) between the three pairs of countries (Belgium/the DRC, the UK/Kenya, Spain/Puerto Rico). The results indicate that the monarchs construct an unequal representation of the FCP and the FC, the former colonial power being represented with a much higher degree of agentivity than its former colony. They furthermore silence the agentivity and the responsibility of the FCP when discussing the colonial past. In the social media data, the agentivity is more equally distributed between the FC and the FCP. In addition, the commentators tend to focus on specific groups within their countries (e.g. leaders, demonstrators), whose representation shapes the discourse on postcolonial relationships. These findings challenge the view that the relationship between the FCPs and FCs is a “modern partnership of equals” (as stated by Charles III) by showing that discourses can still contain traces of a traditional colonial discourse, and provide an unequally agentive representation of former colonial powers and their former colonies.