Originally published as a special issue for the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, Kopytowska's collection presents studies that explore discourses of hate and (political) extremism using a range of theories and methods, including critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics, media proximization, and corpus analysis. Seeking to establish a ‘pragmatic-semantic and pragma-dialectic profile of discourses of hate and radicalism’ (2), the book investigates xenophobic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic discourses as well as ‘radical’ discourses associated with far-right nationalisms and populisms as expressed in a wide variety of genres. Contemporary discourses focuses largely on language practices within European contexts, with chapters examining hate and extremist discourses in Austria, the UK, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Greece.
Ruth Wodak's ‘Saying the unsayable’, for example, takes a discourse historical approach to comparatively examine Holocaust denial strategies associated with the Austrian Freedom Party and the British National Party, demonstrating how these groups use ‘provocation and calculated ambivalence’ along with denying they deny the Holocaust, to gain media coverage and control the discussion, while dog-whistling to party members and sympathizers anti-Semitic messages (36–37).
Most chapters analyse right-wing nationalist xenophobic discourses. Michiel Leezenberg, for example, explores how Islamophobic language functions in Geert Wilder's Dutch Freedom Party's populist discourse. Andreas Musolff investigates the strategies of dehumanization and stigmatization of immigrants in UK-based xenophobic discourse. Monika Kopytowska, Łukasz Grabowski, & Julita Woźniak analyse negative representations of migrants in Polish online media during the 2015–2016 ‘refugee crisis’. Panagiotis Sotiris examines how the Golden Dawn party in Greece harnessed various anti-austerity political discourses (associated with the economic crisis of 2010–2018) to promote its neofascist agenda. Adam Hodges focuses on the US-based National Rifle Association's use of absolutist discourse.
Two chapters shift attention to other forms of hate speech and extremist discourse. Robbie Love & Paul Baker use a corpus-based approach to explore the recent emergence of implicit forms of homophobic political speech in UK right-wing discourses against legalizing same-sex marriages, and Zohar Kampf examines Israeli uses of political insults and responses to them in order to gain, increase, and maintain political power.
Given the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and other forms of far-right populisms in Global North democracies, this collection is certainly timely. But the book thus leaves open questions about the forms and functions of hate and extremist discourse in other locations, making the title's across space a bit overstated. Moreover, it might lead some readers to presume that the only forms of hate and extremism of concern are those associated with right-wing political groups, as it leaves unexamined extremist discourses of the political left. While methods are specialized, readers who lack disciplinary training will still be able to follow the chapter discussions, making this work valuable to audiences outside sociolinguistics, such as activists and policy-makers, who seek to understand the language practices surrounding hate and extremist discourses.
