Semioscaping Eutopia: Qatar As a Place in Qatar Airways Advertisements
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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] SOLS VOL 13.1 2019 57–82 https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.36168 © 2019, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 58 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 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 infrastruc- ture 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’. 60 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 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. SEMIOSCAPING EUTOPIA 61 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.