Semioscaping Eutopia: Qatar As a Place in Qatar Airways Advertisements

Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online)

Article

Semioscaping Eutopia: Qatar as a place in Qatar Airways advertisements

Irene Theodoropoulou

Abstract This paper deals with place branding as a multimodally constructed phenomenon in the digital semioscape of advertisements pertaining to the collaboration between Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona. Through its digital spatialisation, Qatar, and, by extension, Qatari leadership of the country, is argued to construct for and brand itself as an image of eutopia (i.e. a nice place to live) drawing on two techniques, inter-peopleisation and reterritorialisation. In this way, Qatar aims at engaging in controversially conveyed soft politics, whereby it can strategically secure its national sustainability by achieving recognizability, admiration and respect both inside and outside its borders. Qatar Airways’ semioscape is also argued to be a visceral semioscape, whose analysis creates academic fetish, namely added value for Qatar in academic scholarship from a person who has been living and working in the country for nine years. It is important to have such emic reﬂections, in order to do justice to a country that is usually portrayed in very negative and distorted terms in world media, by people who do not have deep knowledge of the country and its people.

KEYWORDS: SEMIOSCAPE, QATAR, MULTIMODALITY, BRANDING, CDA

Afﬁliation

Qatar University, Qatar email: [email protected]

1 Introduction

The State of Qatar is an emirate bordering Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain (see Map 1 below). In 2015 it was claimed to be the richest country in the world with a $131,062.8 GDP per capita1 and 2.7 million residents. Despite its location in a rather precarious geopolitical zone, i.e. between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are rival countries, Qatar is characterised by a remarkable stability, translated into social cohesion and an unprecedented economic development.

Map 1. State of Qatar (© Google Maps).

However, the country has recently come under the world’s spotlight and has stirred up a lot of heated debates in media worldwide due to its diplomatic blockade on the 5 June 2017 from a number of Arab countries, including its neighbors Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, due to its alleged funding of Islamic terrorist groups. In addition, over the years Qatar has triggered lots of criticism all over the world due to purported violation of workers’ human rights, who have been brought in in massive numbers to construct the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup (Theodoropoulou, 2019). These blue-collar workers from the Indian subcontinent form almost 50% of the overall population of Qatar;2 it is also worthy to mention that the number of Qatari nationals in the country is not more than 315,000, a fact that makes Qatar one of the most ethnically, socioculturally, and sociolinguistically diverse countries in the world.3 This big

SEMIOSCAPING EUTOPIA 59 discrepancy in terms of actual life versus how Qatar is portrayed in media all over the world, coupled with its highly diverse population, has only recently started to be investigated in discourse analysis-oriented scholarship (e.g. Theodoropoulou, 2015; Theodoropoulou and Alos, 2018). Discourse analysts have recently started focusing on the concept of space and the ways whereby space can transform itself into place. There seems to be a preference for viewing place as a discursive embodiment (e.g. Johnstone, 2011) through artful stylisations and performances aiming at constructing for oneself and also for a group of people a recognizable identity pertinent to the place. The discussion of place is more challenging in the fluid context of globalisation (Blommaert, 2010; chapters in Coupland, 2010). In alignment with the globalised ‘new’ economy’s preference for an intensified circulation of human, material and symbolic resources (see chapters in Duchêne and Heller, 2012), scholars have begun to recognise how mobility, multiplicity, complexity and fluidity form norms rather than simply marked processes to be explained (Blommaert, 2016; Stroud and Mpendukana, 2006). All these practices point to place as a multimodally constructed and digitally mediated action. As such, it is reflexively configured by other semiotic structures of the environment, including the layout of the space, the built environment, various fixed and non-fixed physical objects and signage, inter alia. Indeed, the premise of multimodal discourse analysis is precisely that any moment of communication is organised and understood through a combination of, and the interaction between, various semiotic resources (cf. van Leeuwen and Kress, 2011). In its multimodally semioscaped format, place is used in countries’ branding activities (e.g. Del Percio, 2016; Thurlow and Aiello, 2007), especially countries which have seen an increase in global recognition over the last couple of decades, such as Singapore, the UAE (especially Dubai and Abu Dhabi) and, last but not least, Qatar (cf. Theodoropoulou and Alos, 2018). These countries try to construct their peculiar narratives by enhancing the assets of their identity and image (e.g. long history, diverse traditions, scientific achievements, wealthy environment) and by downplaying or improving more negative perceptions (e.g. violation of human rights, high criminality rates), in order to be more competitive in the global marketplace, something which lies at the core of any branding process (Aronczyk, 2013; Kamrava, 2013). Branding is understood here as the process whereby composite structures are created, which function ‘as nexus between consumers, products and their producers’ (Burdick, 2016:166); these structures form a semioscape, namely a web of layered configurations of semiotic resources and discourses which index the underlying ideologies and values associated with the branded object, which in this paper is the place called ‘Qatar’.

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A good example of branding taking place in the case of Qatar is the act of putting the logo of Qatar Airways on FC Barcelona’s jerseys (see Image 1), which is obviously an act of entextualisation: something situated and transformed into a text (a representation) to be carried off somewhere else (to a football stadium, or an advertisement).

Image 1. FC Barcelona jersey with Qatar Airways logo (© Google Images).

Given that the logo is essentially worn and moved around by the players and the fans of the team all over the world, it foregrounds the role of the mobile body in the semiotic construction of place, which in turn achieves a global reach. The understanding of the role of the body has recently started emerging as a theme in sociocultural linguistic scholarship (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall, 2016). Here, I am interested in ﬂeshing out the dimensions of this synergy and understanding how these two ‘locals’, namely Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona, contribute towards the embodiment of a translocal and a ‘transnational imaginary’ (Wilson and Dissanayake, 1996:2), which eventually results in the branding of Qatar as a place. At the same time, I consider Qatar Airways’ semioscape as a visceral landscape, namely as an affective semiotic platform of controversial (as I argue below) constructed meanings which as a researcher and as a resident of Qatar for the past seven years I react to. My reaction is documented here, and it is argued to be an inevitable analytical step in ﬁguring out any semioscape. The interesting research question that arises then is how and why Qatar is embodied in place branding material.

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Against this backdrop, the superstar players of FC Barcelona ﬁgure prominently in all Qatar Airways advertisements, which are the focus of my analysis and to whose description I now turn.

2 Methodology and data

The data for this study stem from the Facebook group ‘Qatar Airways’, which had 12,753,836 followers as of 19 March 2018, and from my personal corpus of Qatar Airways-related material. More speciﬁcally, I focus on one promotional video, titled ‘Welcome to FCB Land’ (also known as ‘The Arrival’), which is considered to be the major advertisement video that celebrates the partnership between Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona. The video was showing on all Qatar Airways aircrafts during the period from July 2013 till December 2014 on a personal TV screen found in front of each passenger’s seat in all First class, Business class and Economy class seats. The video, released in 2013, was shown to the passengers immediately after the safety features demonstration video and before the take off. It has been characterised as viral in the press.4 Apart from this video, my data also contain a corpus of 367 images, which are stand-alone advertisements of the two institutions, posted on Facebook during the periods from February 2013 till October 2015. As the data set used in this paper consists of Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona joint multimodal advertisements, the analysis is embedded within multimodality (van Leeuwen and Kress, 2011) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2015). Both these approaches presuppose that discourse instantiated in all norms of semiosis underlines all social processes, which in turn are characterised by relationships of power. Very relevant to the relationship among discourse, power and social process is also the concept of ‘voice’, namely ‘the speaking personality’ (Flowerdew, 2004:583) of a certain mode, whereby discourse is produced. There are three types of voices that have been identiﬁed in research on branding, which are also relevant to this paper: interpersonal voice, promotional voice and authority voice (p. 591). Interpersonal voice is used to attract the audience of the multimodal text, while promotional voice aims at extolling the virtues of the branded object; the voice of authority demonstrates to the public the knowledge and authority of the government (p. 591) These voices, albeit not always easy to separate from each other, essentially realise not only their content and function, but also the ideologies and worldviews behind them. Before I proceed with my analysis, though, some contextual information on Qatar is in order.

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3 State of Qatar

Nowadays an absolute monarchy, Qatar used to be a former British protectorate. The most dominant tribe has been that of the Al Thani, since the mid-nineteenth century, whose members lead the country by occupying the most important positions in its political, financial and social scene.5 The current Emir is H.H. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who is the son of the very powerful and very popular Father Emir, H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Like his father, Sheikh Tamim was trained at Sandhurst Military Academy in the UK, a fact that reflects the strong ties Qatar has with the UK. In the past, Qatar’s economy was rather weak and relied on pearl fishing. However, nowadays the economy of the country is considered to be one of the strongest ones in the world. More specifically, it relies on the vast reserves of oil and, especially, natural gas that the country owns in the North Field, which it ships to major countries in Asia, such as China, South Korea and Japan. Under these circumstances, Qatar has formed a close diplomatic relationship with the aforementioned countries as well as with the United States, which, among other things, has also resulted in Qatar giving the U.S. Air Force the run of the giant Al- Udeid Air Base, which has been crucial to operations over Iraq and Afghanistan. Realizing that natural resources are dispensable, the Qatar administration has started a major attempt to diversify Qatar’s economy by investing in domains such as real estate, sports, education, knowledge and culture. As a result of this, Qatar has bought landmarks all over the world, including London’s 2012 Olympic Village, the Shard and the luxury department store Harrods. In terms of rendering its economy from a natural resource into a knowledge-based one, Qatar’s investments are abundant in terms of tertiary education and the construction of museums. Qatar started becoming known worldwide in 2006, when it played host to the 15th Asian Games, and especially in December 2010, when it was announced that its bid to host the World Cup 2022 was successful (see Image 2). Since then, a great deal of ambitious infrastructure projects,6 including but not limited to the construction of new stadiums (Theodoropoulou, forthcoming), shopping malls, roads, a new metro, to name just a few, have been/are being funded by the State of Qatar, and they attract big numbers of international companies and people from all over the world, who flock to Qatar to work and live for a limited period of time, ranging usually from six months to a number of years. All this activity has resulted and will result in a massive transformation of the landscape of the country (cf. Salama and Wiedmann, 2013) and, accordingly, in a rapid change of its society. These changes are not random or unsystematic but are in alignment with the Qatar Vision 2030,7 namely a roadmap for Qatar’s future.

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Image 2. H.H. Sheikh Hamad, the Father Emir, and his second wife H.H. Sheikha Moza with Sepp Blatter in the announcement of the Qatar’s successful bid to host World Cup 2022 (© Google Images).

Against this backdrop, under-researched Qatar makes an interesting case study for issues having to do with place making and place branding, especially given this orientation to the future as opposed to the past, on which place branding is usually based. The focus of this paper is on how and why this relatively new and very wealthy tiny country promotes itself as a global brand through FC Barcelona’s advertisements. More speciﬁcally, it is argued that its brand is constructed, resemiotised and mobilised as the country’s effort to carve for itself a political niche on the global stage and, in this sense, the case study of Qatar can shed some light onto how soft political power on behalf of a relatively unknown country is indexed through semiotic aspects of branding. In light of this, I start my analytical discussion by contextualizing the partnership between Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona, before I discuss the digital semiotic scape of their joint advertisements.

4 Qatar Airways and its partnership with FC Barcelona

The partnership between Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona lasted from July 2013 until September 2017 and it included an FC Barcelona custom-designed Boeing jet (see Image 3), holiday packages sold through Qatar Airways Holidays Division and a social media competition that gives fans the opportunity to win ﬂights to FC Barcelona matches. ‘Our Club has more than 100 years of history with many glorious moments. Qatar Airways is a young company which is full of enthusiasm and which, like ourselves, strives for excellence in everything it does’, said FC Barcelona Club President Sandro Rosell presenting Akbar Al Baker, CEO of Qatar Airways, with

64 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES an autographed jersey. ‘Both of us are expanding globally in the world, with more and more supporters and customers and we share objectives which will consolidate our partnership’.

Image 3.8 FC Barcelona custom-designed Qatar Airways Boeing jet.

‘We are proud to be uniting with a team that upholds one of my country’s core visions: uniting the world through sport, enriching societies through sport, and creating opportunities through sport’, said Al Baker who, in turn, presented Rosell with a model of the Qatar Airways 787 Dreamliner (see Image 4). ‘FC Barcelona is a team that unites the world. And Qatar Airways is truly a global connector. A perfect match – bringing your fan base closer to your hearts and home.’

Image 4. Qatar Airways CEO Mr. Akbar Al Baker with Barcelona FC’s President Mr. Sandro Rosell (© Google Images).

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Both CEOs’ promotional voices include affective statements indexing their shared core value, which is the uniﬁcation of the world through improving communication between different peoples, countries and places. This is done by drawing on complementary statuses, such as the long and glorious history of FC Barcelona with the young but highly ambitious history in the making that Qatar Airways engages in on a daily basis. The underlying power that brings together these two seemingly uncombinable institutions is their respective orientation to high quality spectacles (high quality football performance and 5* ﬂight services respectively), which can uplift the consumer of these services, as well as a constant effort to break world records: e.g. both institutions always aim at offering the most expensive contracts to football players and to aircraft manufacturers respectively, in order to have the best and most admirable outcome in their respective activities. Such emblematisation of high-quality services on behalf of Qatar Airways con- strues in its brand what Mazzarella (2003:189) has called ‘prosthetic personality’, namely a distinctive voice, which renders the brand relatable and highly desirable to consumers. In this way, the aforementioned promotional voices are heard as Qatar Airways’ interpersonal voice, which presents the company as an attractive service provider. This means that potential customers are more likely to book a flight with the company. At the same time, customers also envision themselves as elites participating in an imaginary ‘semiotic landscape of luxury and privilege’ (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2012) and, therefore, they subscribe to the cosmopolitanism associated with the company. This cosmopolitanism is deconstructed immediately below. One of the most important mottoes of the partnership between the two institutions is ‘The Team That Unites The World’, as seen in Image 5.

Image 5. Qatar Airways advertisement “The Team That Unites The World”.

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By gathering diverse people from all over the world (evident through their phenotypes and clothing) against a background of Camp Nou, which is the seat of FC Barcelona,9 coupled with some iconic landmarks of Qatar, such as the Museum of Islamic Art and the Aspire tower, found on the left side of the background, this advertisement indexes multiple meanings: not only does it reflect and cherish the mixed population that Qatar currently has, which makes it one of the most globalised countries in the world, but it also shows to the rest of the world that people who live and work in Qatar are considered to be superstars, like Messi, Puyol, Piqué and Suárez. Depicted in the foreground of the picture, they embody the concept of being a superstar drawing on their world class performance as footballers. A more critical reading of this advertisement would translate into the Qatari government’s effort, through its voice of authority, to render Qatar a safe destination to travel to and, most importantly, to work and invest in. At the same time, the government does not wish to have expats living and working in the country for a long period of time, because they may then request Qatari citizenship, which is coupled with a number of financial benefits, such as increased salaries (compared to the ones of expats) and receipt of free land subject to marriage, to name just a few. Hence, it tries to convey the message that non-Qataris in particular are welcome in the country, and can experience a high quality of life but for a limited period of time. This is, after all, the gist of playing football in a successful team, such as FC Barcelona: you can reap the multiple benefits of your team by offering your services to it while you belong to it, but at some point in your life you will have to leave your team and give up playing football. The association between living in Qatar and being a player in FC Barcelona is very indirect, but the message it conveys is discreetly powerful. In addition, the fact that there is a female flight attendant standing at the peak of the human pyramid and next to Messi indexes a glocalised meaning: locally speaking, it shows to the rest of the world that women in Qatar are highly respected (contrary to their status in other neighboring countries, such as Saudi Arabia) and, by extension, that Qatar Airways can provide 5* services on a par with Messi’s world-renowned football skills. In this way, Qatar, again through the voice of authority as constructed in the Qatar Airways branding semioscape, stakes a claim for being a country that promotes equality of the two genders. It can be argued Qatar Airways uses this advertisement to respond to accusations by female flight attendants of violations of their basic rights and of very close scrutiny of their personal lives, which has found its expression in cases like the one found in Image 6.

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Image 6. Qatar Airways ﬂight attendant protesting against the violation of women’s rights in the company.10

The issue of gender (in)equality in Qatar is a highly controversial one and, even though a thorough discussion thereof is beyond the scope of this paper due to space limitations (however, see Theodoropoulou, 2018 and Theodoropoulou and Ahmed, 2019), as a white Western female expat, who is an academic, I must say, in a rather oversimplistic way, that for the past nine years I have been living and working in Qatar I have not felt discriminated against on the basis of my gender. However, I have noticed that other women, who have different sociodemographic features, are discriminated against linguistically, psychologically, socially and financially, something which, unfortunately, happens not only in Qatar but also in many other parts of the world. Overall, this advertisement through its semiotic modes depicts what I call inter-peopleisation. Through it, Qatar Airways tries to promote and embrace – albeit in a controversial way – diversity as a first step towards peaceful and harmonious co-existence among people in Qatar and, by extension, in the world, by framing it along the lines of a team-spirit which results from its partnership with FC Barcelona. The term ‘inter-peopleisation’ reflects the constant and euphemeral coming and going of people in Qatar, who usually come on short- term contracts to work and then move on to other countries. Such fleetingness is not conveyed semantically through other, more established, terms that could be used to describe such a state of affairs, for example ‘diversity’, which has a more permanent connotation. Inter-peopleisation is also attached to Qatar through the combination of the modes of photography, the collage of the different people and iconic landmarks as well as through color: the pale tone of Image 6 represents the desert sand that makes most of the natural scape found in Qatar, while the dominant burgundy color indexes the Qatar flag, the most important national symbol of the country, which is seen in the Image 7.

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Image 7. Qatari ﬂag (© Google Images).

In this ﬂag, the burgundy represents the blood shed in Qatari wars over the years (for a brief history of Qatar, see Fromherz, 2012), while the white color stands for peace. Apart from inter-peopleisation, which speaks about equality and mutual respect among the people who make up the social fabric of society in Qatar, Qatar Airways also advertises its power to set the rules in both the football and the aviation business. This is depicted acutely through Image 8.

Image 8. FC Barcelona superstars Suárez, Iniesta, Neymar, Messi and Piqué (from left to right) wearing the Qatar Airways jersey.

Featuring a bodyscape of big stars from FC Barcelona wearing the Qatar Airways kit, this advertisement promotes both linguistically and semiotically the power that Qatar Airways wants to brand, embodied through highly masculine world-class footballers. This power can be read linguistically through the verb ‘reinvent’,

SEMIOSCAPING EUTOPIA 69 which indexes the agency, usually associated with masculinity, behind creating the rules of the game, as opposed to passivity. At the same time, it is embodied semiotically through a syntax of masculine hegemony (cf. Milani and Levon, 2016:6), namely a rhetorical strategy whereby a select few males, who form part of the population of Qatar, claim to represent the whole. A football game comprises the strategies, the offensive and the defensive systems, that FC Barcelona players employ under the guidance of their world-class coach Luis Enrique, which have led them to win multiple local and international champion- ships and which are, therefore, copied by aspiring football clubs all over the world. Likewise, setting the rules in the aviation business for Qatar Airways translates into being able to order the biggest and most luxurious aircraft in the world, such as the Airbus A380, offering unique 5* services both on the ground and in the air, and expanding the network of flight destinations through the addition of strategic cities that rival airlines do not fly to. Overall, this kind of semiotic metonymy in the bodyscape of Qatar Airways represented here is in stark contrast to Image 7, in whose interpersonal voice women were evident, and this can thus be seen as an attempt to erase women from decision-making and rule-setting. Even though from a first reading this power pertains to hegemonic masculinity in football and aviation, a more critical discursive analytical and politically- oriented interpretation of this image includes a soft political attempt on behalf of Qatar Airways and, by extension, the State of Qatar, to trumpet, through their voice of authority, their emerging power in politics, diplomacy and global economics, which has led to the country’s intervention in solving diplomatic problems in the Arab world and to its making high profile investments globally, which have boosted local economies.11 Against this backdrop of portrayal of both equity, respect and, at the same time, gender-related unequal power and prestige, the ensuing analysis of the two video advertisements focuses on how Qatar is branded as a globalised place.

5 Land of FC Barcelona as reterritorialised Qatar

The 90-second advertisement,12 which has become a hit on FC Barcelona’s YouTube channel with nearly 4,000,000 viewers, follows a Qatar Airways female ﬂight attendant touching down in the Land of FC Barcelona, disembarking the Qatar Airways 777 and taking a journey through this utopian destination to the famous Camp Nou Stadium, the seat of FC Barcelona. Throughout her adventure she encounters some of the club’s football stars, past and present, experiences the rich history of FC Barcelona and meets the fans at the heart of FCB.

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Through the mode of video coupled with music, this multimodal text constructs the imaginary land of FC Barcelona as a pastiche of translocal resources from emblematic and widely recognizable places all over the world, such as the cities of New York (skyscrapers, taxis) and London (taxis), as well as the countries of India (bajaj) and China (taoist temples), as well as the emerging city of Doha, the capital of Qatar (cf. Salama and Wiedmann, 2013). The opening scene of the video presents a Qatar Airways aircraft approaching the imaginary land of FC Barcelona as an island (see Image 9) framed in the crest of the team, something which points to the exclusivity and uniqueness of the island, and, by extension, the exclusivity and uniqueness of FC Barcelona and Qatar Airways respectively, two features that are about to unfold and be explicated in the remainder of the video.

Image 9. Imaginary land of FC Barcelona.

The island is shaped according to the team’s logo and it is also half covered by the flag of the team, on top of which the widely recognised acronym of the team is to be found, F(ootball) C(lub) B(arcelona). The remaining uncovered part consists of an aerial photograph of mountains and desert, indexing both Barcelona and Qatar respectively. We get a closer aerial look at this hybrid land six seconds into the video, when FCB land is presented in a similar way to Central Park in New York, that is surrounded by skyscrapers which include some of Doha’s most iconic buildings, among them the Tornado Tower, Burj Qatar (also known as the ‘condom tower’) and Aspire Tower. The use of these high buildings ties in very well with Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher song, which plays throughout the 90-second advert and begins with a plane arriving ‘in the land of FC Barcelona’, where customs officer Gerard Piqué (see Image 10) confirms new signing Neymar has ‘landed’.

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Image and music in unison are used in the promotional voice of the video to create a sense of feeling uplifted, whenever it welcomes its passengers onboard, one of the goals of Qatar Airways. In addition, this sense of upliftedness is enriched with a twist of globalisation, indexed through the aforementioned resources found in the video, a fact that positions the viewer of the advertisement and customer of Qatar Airways as a powerful and satisﬁed global citizen.

Image 10. Piqué sealing Neymar’s passport at Hamad International Airport.

Neymar is seen doing tricks with a football inside the brand new Hamad International Airport, which is depicted in the advertisement as the airport of FC Barcelona (see Image 11). This airport, which has been named after its founder, H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Father Emir of Qatar, is the base of Qatar Airways and a hub in the Gulf region for ﬂights all over the world. In a way, the airport is the face of Qatar to the outside world on the ground, while Qatar Airways’ aircraft are the vehicles of this face, which transfer it all over the world. By including the airport in the advertisement, Qatar Airways tries to raise awareness among its international audience about the new airport, which, similar to Qatar Airways, also offers 5* services on its premises, such as an indoor swimming pool, in which people can swim during their layovers; it also acts as a port for those tourists who are interested in visiting the capital of Qatar, Doha. In addition, the embodiment of tricks by Neymar, which take place in an unexpected place (cf. Pennycook, 2012), reﬂects the World Cup 2022 slogan that Qatar has already tried to incorporate into its campaign, which is ‘expect amazing’ (cf. Theodoropoulou and Alos, 2018).

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Image 11. Neymar doing football tricks at Hamad International Airport.

Outside the airport, which has as its backdrop hills that characterize the surroundings of the city of Barcelona, the female ﬂight attendant gets into a British taxi painted in the colors of FC Barcelona, a taxi that heads a queue of other iconic taxis from different parts of the world, such as a yellow New York cab and, further back, an Indian tuk-tuk, which is also painted in FC Barcelona colors (see Images 12 and 13).

Image 12. Qatar Airways female ﬂight attendant getting into a British taxi.

A critical reading of the existence of these taxis results in the indexing of the multiple and diverse destinations to which Qatar Airways ﬂies and, by extension, the powerful countries of the UK, the United States and India respectively, with

SEMIOSCAPING EUTOPIA 73 which Qatar has strong diplomatic and political ties, ties that are ascertained through and reinforced by this advertisement. Along the same lines, the diverse population of Qatar is cherished, and projected as consisting of predominantly male labor workers from the Indian subcontinent and of many expats from the United States and the UK, respectively.

Image 13. The female ﬂight attendant’s journey from the airport to the Land Barcelona.

The air hostess tours the land, which consists of deterritorialised (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) iconic buildings from Doha, such as Tornado Tower and Aspire Tower, coupled with skyscraper-size emblems of World Cup 2022, including the cup itself as well as a gigantic football, which in unison have been reterritorialised and form the landscape of the fantastic land of FC Barcelona, where everything looks uplifting, buzzing and spectacular. This hybrid form of a reterritorialised place indexes the imaginary future city of Doha, which is going to play primary host to the World Cup 2022. Currently, there are a number of construction sites in Doha, pertaining to new stadiums (see Theodoropoulou, forthcoming), the metro as well as a number of different malls that ﬁgure in the advertisement. These sites are widely advertised both inside and outside Qatar as the projects that will transform dramatically the identity of Doha, since they will contribute towards the creation of a modern and architecturally pioneering country with a zest for football, which as such promises to host the most prominent World Cup in history. After the tour of the land, the Qatar Airways ﬂight attendant sees Andrés Iniesta and Sergio Busquets creating wall art (see Image 14) at Doha’s Corniche, the seaside road of the capital and one of its most emblematic areas.

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Image 14. Iniesta and Busquets’ end art product after kicking the football on a Doha Corniche wall.

The colors used are iconic in the two logos of Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona respectively: blue, red and burgundy. Paradoxically, the end product depicts the celebration of a goal by FC Barcelona, which given its locality can be seen as an example of foreshadowing the celebratory spirit that Qatar wishes to cultivate as it paves the way for the hosting of the 2022 World Cup. In addition, the team spirit represented by the two institutions is once again evident here, leading to a goal, in other words to great success, which is the target of both and, by extension, this is the image that Qatar wants to cultivate for itself and to exhibit to the rest of the world. In this way, by drawing on emotional rather than rational power, this part of the advert can be seen as yet another example of the soft politics that the country voices in the sense that it portrays the country’s attempt to respond to the primarily Western calls for World Cup 2022 to be stripped from Qatar.13 This excerpt in the video resonates not only with the rich history of art pertinent to Barcelona and Spain, in general, but also with the high investment of Qatar in art. More speciﬁcally, Qatar invests heavily in the stock market of world art by buying some of the most expensive pieces of art with the aim of putting itself on the world map of museums of distinction. A recent example of an expensive piece of art that is argued to have been purchased by H.H. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Chairperson of Qatar Museums Authority, includes Paul Gauguin’s painting titled ‘Nafea Faa Ipoipo’ (When Will You Marry?) for a price close to $300 million, according to the New York Times.14 In this sense, in the campaign of Qatar Airways, football, a stereotypically rather popular activity, goes hand in hand with art, which is stereotypically more eclectic and addressed to a more limited audience, a fact that echoes the reality of Qatar’s investment foci, which in turn are in alignment with its 2030 Vision.15

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Along the same lines of emphasizing art, Lionel Messi is found in a hall coordinating a session of footballing aerobics (see Image 15) and teaching younger generations how to play football through dancing with a football. Once again, there are multiple meanings indexed here: ﬁrst of all, the advertisement projects aerobics and exercising in general as an example of modus vivendi for the consumers of Qatar Airways, a fact that is also in full alignment with Qatar’s voice of authority trying to instill in its population a zest for a healthy lifestyle, which has culminated in the establishment of a National Sports Day, celebrated each year since 2012. The country’s love for sports is, hence, projected in an indirect but authoritative way to both people inside and outside the country.

Image 15. Lionel Messi doing football aerobics with youngsters.

Apart from sports, this scene from the advert also highlights the importance that the country places on younger generations and the fact that it constructs for itself an image of a place where youth can change the status quo of the country and the region in general. The most apt proof of this is H.H. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, who took power at the age of just 33 years after the abdication of his father. He is considered to be the youngest monarch in the Gulf and one of the youngest leaders of any country in the world. Youth tends to be associated with hope, which is the underlying message of this scene: because Qatar is led by youth, it is a country full of hope that will be able to organise a successful World Cup that everybody, and especially youngsters, will enjoy. The ﬁnal interesting scene of the Land Barcelona advertisement is one where Carles Puyol offers a 5* star service by protecting a couple from a falling ﬂower pot, which he heads and breaks into smithereens (see Image 16). This spectacular scene, in which Puyol essentially heads a ball but which through special effects is

76 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES shown like a ﬂower pot, indexes another very important aspect of Qatar Airways as an airline and for Qatar as a place and as the host of World Cup 2022, which is safety. Qatar prides itself and always projects for itself an image of one of the safest countries in the world.16 Safety turns out to be a particularly important asset highlighted by Qatar, especially in the context of the current ISIS attacks all over the world and also in the context of the recent cut in diplomatic ties with its neighboring countries in the Gulf. In other words, one of the aims of Qatar through this scene is to certify that tourists who visit Qatar as well as the fans that are expected to ﬂock to the country in November 2022, when the World Cup is due to kick off, will be in an environment of 5* safety.

Image 16. Charles Puyol protecting two women from a falling ﬂower pot.

At the end of the advertisement, the ﬂight attendant arrives at Camp Nou (see Image 17), where she meets with Barcelona fans from all over the world and comes to understand what 5* service means in both the context of Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona: a balanced combination of inter-peopleisation and reterritorialisation, which paves the way for creating Qatar, the future host of World Cup 2022, as an imaginary place characterised by different cultures, different styles, different mentalities and different interests, which come together in unison to celebrate human social life symbolised through football. In sum, the analysis of the semioscape of FCB’s advertisements suggests that the latter is employed as a vehicle for the construction and circulation of the brand Qatar as an eutopia (from the Greek words eu = well, and topos = space), namely as a place of happiness, potential, hope, creativity, respect for the people, new ideas, tradition and passion for continuous improvement, which will lead not only to the successful organisation of a safe World Cup 2022 but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the country’s sustainability and its establishment as a strong and respectable player on the global scene.

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Image 17. Qatar Airways female ﬂight attendant arriving at Camp Nou.

6 Concluding discussion

The analysis of the digital semioscape pertaining to the advertisements of Qatar Airways in partnership with FC Barcelona has sought to demonstrate (and understand) how Qatar, a discursively under-researched site but one of rising importance on the global socioeconomic and political scene, is branded as a place, namely how it emerges as a place through a chain of mediated advertisement actions. As public spaces ‘with visible inscription made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making’ (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2011:2), semioscapes represent, mediatise and organise social life. A critical analysis of the discourses indexed through the semioscape of Qatar has yielded useful insights into how the image of the country manifests and reproduces ‘matrixes of power and ideologies of similarities (my addition) and difference in the broader context of “advanced” and “global” capitalism’ (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2011:2). The airline-related imprint of Qatar can be seen as more discursively mediated or increasingly semioticised than in the past, and this is primarily due to the affordances of technology and the fact that the latter has reached a wide and diverse audience not only inside but primarily outside the country. The semioscape instantiated through Qatar Airways advertisements can be seen as constructing Qatar as a place of proﬁtable hybridity, marketable diversity and attractive ambiguity (cf. Burdick, 2016:165). As such, it voices, informs and, eventually, legitimises Qatar’s position as a strong, reliable and progressive-thinking player in the global stage. The eutopic brand of Qatar is deeply complicitous in the ideologies of globalisation, but the format of globalisation that the emirate itself wants to project to the rest of the world is articulated as one which puts Qatar at the center of the airline-related activity, which in turn has a global scope and reach.

78 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES

Against this background, the concept of soft power is being used as a macro- level understanding of the rationale behind Qatar’s decision to use mega sport events, such as the upcoming World Cup 2022, as part of a package of ‘politics of attraction’ (Grix and Houlihan, 2014). My analysis has tried to illustrate how such ‘soft power’ plays out in practice in the digital semioscape of Qatar Airways advertisements and the main argument that is put forward here is that this eutopic image that is cultivated through the strategies of inter-peopleisation and reterritorialisation aims at encouraging and increasing tourism, trade and influence by raising branded awareness of Qatar all over the world. This is a relatively recent turn in the politics of the country, which has always wanted to avoid imitating neighboring countries, and especially the emirate of Dubai, which prioritises mass tourism. Qatar has always aimed for a select high-end tourism, such as conference, education and art tourism, as well as sports tourism in the shape of having teams coming to Qatar to train, taking advantage of the pleasant winter climate. The recent shift in oil prices, of course, which are currently historically low, has inevitably led all Gulf countries, including Qatar, to reconsider their financial and sociopolitical tactics and to re-prioritise their goals. Trying to link this idea of soft power to multimodal communication, I would suggest that in order to understand it we need to understand the semiotics of contact, a term that has been inspired by Rampton’s (2009) suggestion to shift from a ‘linguistics of community’ to a ‘linguistics of contact’ (p. 705). Since its beginnings, FC Barcelona has been characterised by being not just a football organisation, but also a powerful force for globalisation, solidarity, integration and social cohesion. Qatar Airways fully identifies with these values, which is why both institutions have come into contact and have embodied their strategic partnership by alleviating it to the level of more than just a simple economic alliance. Through their joint advertisements, they try to redefine the rules of the global competition and to establish themselves as a powerful, pioneering and socially oriented consortium with an interest in social harmony. The visceral implications of such an analysis and personal reflection on processes of branding Qatar through FC Barcelona include the construction, on my behalf, of an academic fetish (cf. Kelly-Holmes’ [2016] ‘linguistic fetish’), namely the creation of value for Qatar in academic scholarship from a person who has been living and working in the country for seven years. It is important to have such emic reflections, in order to do justice to a country that is usually portrayed in very negative and distorted terms in world media. Just as the semiotics of contact, as I have shown above, can contribute to our understanding of the complexities of how soft politics work in the case of Qatar Airways’ semioscaped eutopia, I would like to suggest that we need more analytical contact among

SEMIOSCAPING EUTOPIA 79 scholars, whose research focuses on less investigated landscapes, in order to create the circumstances of providing fair and realistic insights into how and why places are branded in the way they are.

Notes

1. Retrieved from: https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/country-data/qatar-gdp- country-report. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 2. Retrieved from: http://www.gulf-times.com/story/551851/Qatar-s-population- touches-2-7mn-new-figures-show. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 3. Retrieved from: http://priyadsouza.com/population-of-qatar-by-nationality-in- 2017/. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 4. Retrieved from: http://www.fcbarcelona.com/club/detail/article/the-land-of-fcb- behind-the-scenes. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 5. Retrieved from: http://priyadsouza.com/powerful-families-qatar-al-thani/?utm_ source=Priya%27s+Qatar+Untold&utm_campaign=0a7b223ffd- Standard_new_post_campaign1_31_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ 55ae655d11-0a7b223ffd-43255645. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 6. Retrieved from: http://www.lifeinqatar.com/en/article/living/fifa-world-cup- 2022-in-qatar.html. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 7. Retrieved from: http://www.gsdp.gov.qa/portal/page/portal/gsdp_en/qatar_ national_vision. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 8. The images are all taken from the Facebook Qatar Airways group, unless otherwise stated. 9. Retrieved from: http://www.qatarisbooming.com/article/qatar-airways-lands- camp-nou. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 10. Retrieved from: http://www.itfglobal.org/en/news-events/news/2015/september/ qatar-airways-silent-protest-at-airline-show/. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 11. For a discussion of initiatives in all these domains, which position Qatar as an important powerful player in the global political, diplomatic and financial sphere, see Kamrava (2013). 12. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiZ7h9hDSv8. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 13. Retrieved from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-3113870/ Qatar-stripped-2022-World-Cup-according-country-s-whistleblower.html. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 14. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/arts/design/gauguin- painting-is-said-to-fetch-nearly-300-million.html?_r=0b. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 15. Retrieved from: http://www.mdps.gov.qa/en/qnv1/Pages/default.aspx. Accessed on 20/3/2018. 16. Retrieved from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/safest- countries-in-the-world/. Accessed on 20/3/2018.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors of this Special Issue as well as to the anonymous reviewers for useful feedback on earlier versions of the paper. This study has been funded with a Seed Funding Grant (CHSS-SF-14-7) from the Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Qatar University, and a Junior Scientists Research Experience Program Grant (JSREP 4 -009 -6 -003) from Qatar National Research Fund. The opinions, ﬁndings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of Qatar National Research Fund.

About the author

Irene Theodoropoulou is Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis at Qatar University, Qatar. Her current research interests include branding practices and political discourse analysis in Qatar and Greece. She is the author of Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens (John Benjamins, 2014) and she has published her research on Qatar and Greece in numerous peer reviewed journals and edited volumes. Further information about her research can be found here: https://qu.academia.edu/IreneTheodoropoulou.

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(Received January 2017; accepted July 2017; revision received 23th March 2018; ﬁnal revision received 15th June 2018; ﬁnal revision accepted 18th June 2018)