Political speech acts? Jacques Rancière's theories and a political philology of current discourses of migration

Abstract

When the topic for this paper was first chosen in early 2015, discourses of migration were rather different from how they have developed since, especially in a German-language context. At the time, migration was not the prominent theme it became later in the same year: even the fact that thousands of people had already drowned and continued to die in the Mediterranean on a dangerous journey towards Europe had not led to a wide-spread debate in German-language media. This was before the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and a supposed German ‘welcome culture’ became predominant topics in summer 2015. Since then, there has again been a rise in open anti-immigrant discourses and violence by right-wing nationalists as well as an implementation of restrictions on migration so that the ‘welcome culture’ has been frequently called into doubt from various perspectives.'