La construction des frontières nationales à l’ère numérique : analyse critique des discours en ligne sur l’immigration et les minorités racialisées au Québec

This research aims to study the contemporary transformations of nationalism in Quebec by examining the social representations of citizens who belong to the ethnic majority, namely French-Canadians. While many studies have been interested in elite discourse, the analytical focus here is on the discourse that comes from below, that of the "ordinary majority". Discourses on migration and “diversity” are now widely relayed in the digital space where all can publicly express their interests, opinions and identities. What are the dominant representations of racialized migrants and minorities in digital disursive practices? What understandings of the imagined national community and its borders do these discourses on “the others” allow to see? The goal is to analyze and contextualize the global phenomenon of diffusion of nationalist discourses on social media – both exclusive and exclusive – and to study empirically their relations with the processes of ethnic categorization and racialization. Following an analytical framework inspired by the critical theories of nationalism, race and whiteness, social media are understood as new sites of power where discourse is influenced and conditions racialized inequalities. The data consists of speeches freely expressed by users on social media. More specifically, a corpus of 3,000 comments written in response to media articles published on the Facebook platform is analyzed. The 45 selected news articles are produced by the five largest Quebec media. The analyzed data were produced as part of three socially polarizing events: debates on the Canadian government's resettlement program for Syrian refugees in the fall of 2015; the referendum on the proposed Muslim cemetery in the Quebec City area in the summer of 2017; and the arrival of asylum seekers of Haitian descent in the summer of 2017. The methodology is inspired by the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and, more particularly, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). The results show a high prevalence of speeches that frame the events in a negative way. The main commonplaces and argumentative strategies that serve to legitimize exclusion and differential inclusion while denying racism are identified. Commentators seek to legitimize their exclusivist or restrictive postures by associating the Other with economic, security, democratic-legal and cultural threats. The results show the importance of analyzing the discourse on identity and otherness by tracing the articulations between the economic, political and cultural spheres, and situating them in their contexts of enunciation as well as in the contemporary conjuncture. The dynamics of positive self-presentation and negative presentation of the Other take place through the establishment of a resentful triangular relationship where “the people” is portrayed as unjustly disadvantaged and put at risk by elites who would grant undue advantages to “strangers” to the detriment of those who are seen as belonging and deserving more.

Keyphrases: nationalism, racism, ethnicity, Quebec, social media, critical discourse analysis, resentment, governmental belonging