Shaming to Emancipate: Metaphoric Bipolarisation in Jordanian Online Socio-Political Editorials
Main Article Content
Abstract
The emotion of shame in the Arab context is culturally specific and viewed in a shame-honour paradigm. The interdisciplinary study here unpacks the Jordanian sociopolitical issues which are embedded within the cultural concept of shaming using a critical metaphor method. The study on selected 97 online editorials written by Ahmad Hasan al-Zu’bi here reveals a metaphoric bipolarisation technique which conjures the notions of shame on Arab’s sociopolitical submissiveness to global powers but argues that the global powers’ domination is a myth. These claims communicated by the dual metaphors provoke the most intense shame emotion as they violate the Arab tradition and honour. They are intended at awakening the people from their own powerlessness due to internal squabbling and corrupt leadership as well as hegemony of external powers. From the perspective of political communication in the digital age, they echo both nationalistic and populist intentions through the dichotomous shame-pride cultural paradigm. Generally, this study demonstrates that the use of these journalistic rhetorical moves which are rooted in a shame herd culture is a distinctive tactical communication capable of foregrounding an emancipatory agenda in restoring the honour of any sociopolitically affected community.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed. 2020. Moral metaphor and gender in Arab visual culture: Debunking Western myths. Social Semiotics 30(5): 715–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2019.1604991
Al-Uzaizi, Rox Bin Za’id. 2012. Ma’lamat at-turath al-aurduni, the Jordanian folk literature (Part 1). Amman: Ministry of Culture.
Al Jallad, Nader. 2010. The concept of “shame” in Arabic: Bilingual dictionaries and the challenge of defining culture-based emotions. Language Design: Journal of Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics 12: 31–57.
Albtoush, Mohammad Abedltif. 2020. Metaphors of political satire: A study of online Jordanian news column. PhD diss., Universiti Malaya.
Albtoush, Mohammad Abedltif and Ang, P.S. 2021. Marriage and family metaphors in online Jordanian sociopolitical editorials. Journal of Modern Languages 31(1): 22–43. https://doi.org/10.22452/jml.vol31no1.2
Ang, P.S. and Fauziah Taib. 2023. Fear generation in the multimodal communication of sexual and reproductive health to Malaysian adolescents. Visual Communication 22(3): 449–468. https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572231163555
Ang, P.S. and Yeo, S.L. 2018. Exclusionary visual depiction of disabled persons in Malaysian news photographs. Discourse and Communication 12(5): 457–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481318766922
Arcimaviciene, L. and Baglama, S.H. 2018. Migration, metaphor and myth in media representations: The ideological dichotomy of “them” and “us”. SAGE Open 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018768657
Atatfa, Omar Ali Wally and Al-Mamoory, Salih Mahdi Adai. 2017. A critical discourse analysis of Russia today’s in-group and out-group presentation in the Syrian crisis news reports. Education and Linguistics Research 3(2): 1. https://doi.org/10.5296/elr.v3i2.11437
Badahdah, Abdallah M. and Foote, C.E. 2010. Role of shame in the stigmatization of people with human immunodeficiency virus: A survey of female college students in 3 Arab countries. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal 6(9): 982–987.
Becheur, I. and Valette-Florence, P. 2014. The use of negative emotions in health communication messages: Study of the effects of fear, guilt, and shame. Recherche et Applications en Marketing (English Edition) 29(4): 89–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/2051570714552620
Berkson, M. 2021. A Confucian defense of shame: Morality, self-cultivation, and the dangers of shamelessness. Religions 12(1): 32. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010032
Butulussi, E. 2019. Practical reasoning and metaphor in TV discussions on immigration in Greece. In Migration and media: Discourses about identities in crisis, eds. L. Viola and A. Musolff, 163–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.08but
Cain, P., Donaghue, N. and Ditchburn, G. 2017. Concerns, culprits, counsel, and conflict: A thematic analysis of “obesity” and fat discourse in digital news media. Fat Studies 6(2): 170–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1244418
Cameron, L. and Low, G. 1999. Researching and applying metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524704
Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000612
. 2018. Analyzing political speeches: Rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. London: Palgrave.
De Cleen, B. 2017. Populism and nationalism. In Handbook of populism, eds. C.R. Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ostiguy and P.O. Espejo, 342–362. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Groot, M., Schaafsma, J., Castelain, T., Malinowska, K., Mann, L., Ohtsubo, Y., Wulandari, M.T.A., Bataineh, R.F., Fry, D.P., Goudbeek, M. and Suryani, A. 2021. Group-based shame, guilt, and regret across cultures. European Journal of Social Psychology 51(7): 1198–1212. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2808
El-Sharif, Ahmad. 2014. Anti-coercion function of metaphors in Jordanian media discourse. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 4(4): 138–148.
Everbach, T. 2017. Monica Lewinsky and shame: 1998 newspaper framing of “that woman”. Journal of Communication Inquiry 41(3): 268–287. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859917707920
Fallah, Nahid and Moini, Mohammad Raouf. 2016. A critical metaphor analysis of Arab uprisings in The Washington Post and Keyhan editorials. Metaphor and the Social World 6(1): 79–102. https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.6.1.04fal
Fenwick, J., Staff, L., Gamble, J., Creedy, D.K. and Bayes, S. 2010. Why do women request caesarean section in a normal, healthy first pregnancy? Midwifery 26(4): 394–400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2008.10.011
Georgis, D. 2013. Thinking past pride: Queer Arab shame in Bareed MISTA3JIL. International Journal of Middle East Studies 45(2): 233–251. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743813000056
Goffman, E. 2017. Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. London: Routledge.
Har-Zvi, S. 2016. The return of the Russian bear to the Middle East. Vol. 120. Israel: BarIlan University.
Harkins, J. 1996. Linguistic and cultural differences in concepts of shame. In Shame and the modern self, eds. D. Parker, R. Dalziell and I.R. Wright, 84–96. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Heo, M. and Park, J. 2019. Shame and vicarious shame in the news: A case study of the Sewol ferry disaster. Journalism 20(12): 1611–1629. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916688928
Isenberg, A. 1973. Natural pride and natural shame. Aesthetics and the theory of criticism: Selected essays. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Javidi, B. and Okano, F. 2002. Three-dimensional television, video, and display technologies. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer
Jaworska, S. 2011. Anti-Slavic imagery in German radical nationalist discourse at the turn of the twentieth century: A prelude to Nazi ideology? Patterns of Prejudice 45(5): 435–451. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2011.624762
Kollareth, D., Fernandez-Dols, J.-M. and Russell, J.A. 2018. Shame as a culture-specific emotion concept. Journal of Cognition and Culture 18(3–4): 274–292. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340031
Kort, S. 2018. Metaphor in media discourse: Representations of “Arabs” and “Americans” in American and Arab news media. PhD diss., University of the West of England.
Kövecses, Z. 2005. Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511614408
Lakoff, G. 1991. Metaphor and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. Peace Research 23(2/3): 25–32. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.61.36lak
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. and Turner, M. 1989. More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226470986.001.0001
Landes, R. 2007. Edward Said and the culture of honor and shame: Orientalism and our misperceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel Affairs 13(4): 844–858. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537120701445315
Lovejoy, A.O. 1936. The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
McIntyre, K. 2015. Constructive journalism: The effects of positive emotions and solution information in news stories. PhD diss., University of North Carolina.
Musolff, A. 2006. Metaphor scenarios in public discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 21(1): 23–38. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms2101_2
Nartey, M. 2019. Metaphor and Kwame Nkrumah’s construction of the “unite or perish” myth: A discourse-mythological analysis. Social Semiotics 30(5): 646–664. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2019.1568220
Orwell, G. 2021. Animal farm. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pragglejaz Group. 2007. MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22(1): 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480709336752
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge.
Semino, E. 2008. Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schaefer, D.O. 2020. Whiteness and civilization: Shame, race, and the rhetoric of Donald Trump. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17(1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019.1667503
Shadbolt, C. 2009. Sexuality and shame. Transactional Analysis Journal 39(2): 163–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/036215370903900210
Stavrakakis, Y. 2004. Antinomies of formalism. Laclau’s theory of populism and the lessons from religious populism in Greece. Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3): 253–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356931042000263519
Steen, G.J, Dorst, A.G., Berenike Herrmann, J., Kaal, A.A., Krennmayr, T. and Pasma, T. 2010. A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. Vol. 14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Wierzbicka, A. 1992. Talking about emotions: Semantics, culture, and cognition. Cognition and Emotion 6(3): 285–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411073
Zibin, Aseel. 2018. The effect of the Arab Spring on the use of metaphor and metonymy in Jordanian economic discourse: A cognitive approach. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16(1): 254–298. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00010.zib
Zibin, Aseel and Hamdan, Jihad M. 2019. The conceptualization of FEAR through conceptual metonymy and metaphor in Jordanian Arabic. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies 19(2): 243–266. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes2000.19.2.1