Mapping the rise of authoritarian populism and language in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Drawing on writings by Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci as well as theories of sociolinguistics, this project tracks the emergence of an ideological language associated with authoritarian populism and how this ideology language has come to construct the Other, the People and the ways in which the Other is responsible for a lack of development for the People. This emergence is situated at the conjuncture of an entrenched socio-economic crisis as well as an unravelling ANC hegemony. This hegemony, which has characterized post-apartheid South Africa has seen significant shifts and declines in the past decade. Through historical processes of nation building which took place at the end of apartheid, notions of belonging and nationality have been baked into post-ANC politics, often manifesting in xenophobia. This forms a crucial part of the rise to prominence of a political ecosystem. This ecosystem has increasingly drawn on exclusionary and violent politics to give direction to a new hegemonic project in the country, using ideological language to construct a crisis with the Other at the centre. This study takes a mixed-methods approach, drawing on the use of Natural Language Processing and a systematic review in order to map the emergence of language of authoritarian populism.