A discursive reading of ideology, dominance and resistance in political texts

Abstract

The North (or the West) considers itself superior to the South and has thus arrogated to itself the right to ‘guide’ it in many a sphere, something that has gone down badly with some countries in the South, so much so that some of them resist this domination. It is against this background that this paper analyses four texts from the two contending geo-political zones to untangle discursive strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other presentation. Using Teun van Dijk’s (2006) ideological square, the paper analyses the texts concerning aspects of ideology, dominance and resistance. It has been found that Donald Trump and the European Parliament (representing the North), as well as John Pombe Joseph Magufuli and Nicolas Maduro (representing the South), deployed semantic macrostructures, macro-speech acts, the active voice and lexical resources, among others, to do positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. The paper contends that the two sides deployed the strategies because the North wants to continue dominating and exploiting the South and the South wants to liberate itself from the chain the former placed around its neck centuries ago. About the South’s goal, the paper shows how the South could go it alone, with a bias towards Africa.