Discursive constructions of responsibilities in postcolonial contexts : a contrastive study

Most European countries are confronted with debates related to their postcolonial past and/or their current relationship with former colonies. The possible restitution of artifacts acquired during the colonial period, the decolonisation of these countries’ public space or the possibility for these former colonial powers (FCP) to provide their former colonies (FC) with apologies or compensation for colonial crimes they committed are examples of questions which have been extensively discussed in FCP’s mediatic and political spheres. While such debates are not new, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, started in 2020, triggered new approaches to these issues (Verbeke 2020, Mayo 2024). Members of FC diasporas living in FCP positioned themselves as the major actors of this revival, drawing the public’s attention to fundamental issues as to how debates related to (post)colonisation were traditionally held. They notably denounced the regular exclusion of FC voices from such discussions, as well as the stereotyped representation of FC and FCP these discussions relied on. This poster reports on a PhD project which specifically addresses these two aspects of postcolonial debates (who is given a voice, and what representations of FC/FCP are transmitted) from the perspective of their linguistic construction. Focusing on three FCP in relation to three FC (Belgium in relation to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Spain in relation to Bolivia and the UK in relation to Kenya), it analyses a corpus constituted of i) press articles published in the three FCP between 2020 and 2025, and addressing a postcolonial issue or an aspect of the postcolonial relationship between the FCP and the FC, and ii) interviews which will be realized with people identifying themselves as members of the Congolese, Bolivian and Kenyan diasporas and living in Belgium, Spain and the UK, respectively. On the one hand, the project is aimed at providing a mapping of who (i.e. FC or FCP voices) is given a voice in the press to express their views on such topics and of the importance given to their respective discourses (in terms of number of words, position in article, etc.). Particular attention is paid to the way these voices’ identity is negotiated, i.e. to what identity features of these voices (e.g. ethnic background, gender, expertise, etc.) are foregrounded by journalists (in the press corpus) as well as by these voices self (in both the press corpus and the qualitative interviews), using the methodological tools of Membership Categorization Analysis (Schrikant 2022). On the other hand, the study will mobilize the concepts of agentivity (De Cock & Michaud Maturana 2018) and of meaningful silences (Schröter & Taylor 2019) to analyse the discursive construction of the FC and FCP’s representations, and in particular the representation of their responsibility in relation to events which took place during or after the colonial period. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods and by working with a plurality of contexts, discourses and voices, this study aims to provide new perspectives on how (post)colonial pasts are discursively addressed in the mediatic sphere of former colonial powers.