MEDIATISING RESISTANCE TO CONTEMPORARY FASCISM ON YOUTUBE: VOICING DISSENT IN BRAZILIAN RAP

ABSTRACT In recent years, an on-going shift from more progressive political, social and cultural relations towards a more conservative turn around the world has been under way. A fascist political stance (STANLEY, 2018) has been noted in different parts of the globe and politicians have been able to gather followers dissatisfied with crumbling economies by usually making recourse to an “us versus them” discourse. Such dissatisfaction and bias have found fertile ground in social media platforms, e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp, and elevated the tensions around such issues to a level never before seen. In the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, similar tensions were fuelled by a candidate with an authoritarian, xenophobic and misogynistic discourse. More importantly, that authoritarian discourse did not go unchallenged and the same social media platforms were home for constant resistance to it such as, for instance, the movement #nothim, created by the Facebook group “Women United against Bolsonaro”, and the rap/hip hop movement in Brazil, which released protest songs and a manifesto called “Rap for Democracy” on YouTube. In this paper, we focus on one music video in particular, ‘Primavera Fascista’ (“Fascist Spring”) to present a multimodal analysis of how resistance to that candidate’s discourse was constructed. We look into visual, sound, musical and linguistic resources (KRESS, 2010; MACHIN, 2010). Drawing upon a view of language as performative (PENNYCOOK, 2004; 2007), we use the analytical constructs of entextualization (BAUMAN & BRIGGS, 1990) and indexicality (BLOMMAERT, 2005; 2010) to show that the rap song is an exhaustive discursive exercise of metapragmatic reflexivity on the performative effects of a number of fascist statements produced by the candidate.