Emerging in the context of globalization's imbalanced growth, populist leaders’ often ethnocentric calls for renewed national sovereignty frequently focus on borders. Through his qualitative research, Massimiliano Demata examines the discourses of borders and nationalism and the language of fear and exclusion often inherent in them. He shows how a border is not solely a geographic demarcation but ‘a dynamic social factor in the construction of [a] nation whose meaning is negotiated, conceptualised, and known through discourse’ (3). Central to that construction are historical discourses of national identity and discursive strategies of legitimation and delegitimation.
To understand how these discourses have emerged and changed, Demata examines their broader sociocultural and historical contexts using the discourse-historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse analysis (CDA). Fundamental to this examination is DHA's emphasis on the dialogical relations between language, at the micro-level, and the macro-level structures of ideology and social relations. Specifically, Demata attends to the recontextualisation of border discourses, that is, how they move from one site of production to another and how that contextual shift ‘has important ideological implications in the way discourses present and evaluate social reality’ (6). He analyses these discursive processes using a corpus of political speeches, interviews, official documents, and social media posts from Democrat and Republican US leaders—primarily, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—debating how to respond to migrants crossing the US southern border.
Through this analysis, Demata argues that Trump used the border to build a logic of exclusion as part of his nativist immigration policies and, more broadly, fear (in this case, of so-called outsiders) as a political strategy. Central to these exclusionary discourses, Demata contends, is Trump's aestheticizing of the border wall, branding it as he does his exclusive luxury properties, such that the wall becomes a symbol in the debate over who belongs, and who does not, in the nation. Demata contrasts this ethnocentric rhetoric with the border discourse of progressives who shared Trump's concern about national security but countered his calls for a physical wall with a smart border, one that leverages technology to secure the border while treating crossing migrants humanely. Demata shows how, in her rebuttals to Trump and support for a smart border, Clinton used the language of emotion to invoke notions of the US as a compassionate, welcoming nation of immigrants. This merging of affect and historical discourses with the neoliberal language of technical efficiency, Demata argues, formed part of Democrats’ larger political strategy of recontextualising family values discourse, long a pillar of conservative rhetoric, as progressive immigration policy.
As populist and neoliberal discourses contend to define a post-global world, Demata reminds us how borders—including the plights of those attempting to cross them—can serve as symbols of social order as well as proxies for political struggle. Although brief, his study offers important insights into how the recontextualisation of political discourses, namely, of family values, the aesthetics of exclusion, and the neoliberal ethics of modernity, contribute to ideological discursive formation and contemporary political language.
