Elliott-Harvey, C. orcid.org/0000-0002-6649-4571 (2020) Considering ethnic group tensions: the symptomatic case of French comedian Dieudonné. Open Library of Humanities, 6 (2). pp. 1-48.
Abstract
This article examines the 2014 case of French comedian Dieudonné and his purported incitement to hatred through his comedy act at the time, which hit national headlines and danced along the line of acceptable speech and making fun of the Holocaust. At the same time, Dieudonné’s comedy appealed to a faction of French society that felt relegated and ignored by the French elite, a sentiment that was furthered by a clash between one religious group that has legal protections in place to protect it from Holocaust denial, versus another group that does not have similar protections in place for Islamophobic acts. This case study demonstrates how Dieudonné tapped into these sensitive areas of cultural life by engaging the communicative genres of humour and satire to draw attention to and toy with making fun of the Holocaust, though his comedy act, Le Mur (The Wall), a silly song about the Holocaust, and an arm gesture called the ‘quenelle’. Using a textual thematic analysis of online newspaper articles collected at the time from Le Figaro and Le Monde, as well as transcripts from ten in-person, semi-structured interviews conducted in Paris with activists, journalists, politicians, a lawyer, and a comedian, what the findings point to is that while Dieudonné appealed to a disenfranchised audience as a ‘provocateur’, he also highlighted how key factions of French society are struggling with inclusivity and a lack of social cohesion in a political context where laïcité, the separation of religious life and political life, is sacrosanct.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Journalism Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 06 Oct 2020 12:19 |
Last Modified: | 06 Oct 2020 12:19 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.16995/olh.528 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:165846 |