The circulation of online hate speech against refugees: entextualization, indexicality and intelligibility

Abstract

This article discusses the circulation of hate speeches against Venezuelan migrants and refugees on Facebook, as well as their effects on linguistic violence, in the construction of discursive policies of human intelligibility. Conceptually, it articulates perspectives that take language as a performance, that is, as a mode of social and political action involved in the elaboration of reality, with those related to the mobility of discourse and the indexical character of linguistic signs. In analytical terms, one focuses on the processes of entextualization, indexicality and the orders of indexicality mobilized in the speech acts analyzed, in order to visualize the way in which historically constructed Discourses — which circulate translocal and trans-temporally — appear in situated linguistic interactions in order to reiterate semiotically, processes of social hierarchy. The constructed interpretations point to the entextualization of xenophobic discourses based on dehumanization, on the criminalization of migration and on the pathologization of difference as instruments of production of a racialized and inferiorized Other.