Research Companion to Language and Country Branding

Irene Theodoropoulou, Johanna Tovar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000214406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Research Companion to Language and Country Branding brings together entirely new interdisciplinary research conducted by scholars working on various sociolinguistic, semiotic, anthropological and discursive analytical aspects of country branding all over the world.

Branding is a process of identity construction, whereby countries gain visibility and put themselves on the world map as distinctive entities by drawing on their history, culture, economy, society, geography, and their people. Through branding, countries aim not only at establishing their uniqueness but also, and perhaps most importantly, at attracting tourism, investments, high quality human capital, as well as at forging financial, military, political and social alliances. Against this backdrop, this volume explores how countries and regions imagine and portray others and themselves in terms of gender, ethnicity, and diversity today as well as the past. In this respect, the book examines how branding differs from other, related policies and practices, such as nation building, banal nationalism, and populism.

This volume is an essential reference for students, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in country, nation, and place branding processes.

PART I

Nationalism and country branding

Nationalism and politics

1

ENREGISTERING THE NATION

Bolsonaro's populist branding of Brazil

Daniel N. Silva

Introduction

In October 2018, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro, a federal representative from the State of Rio de Janeiro and a retired army captain, who had made inflammatory (and for many, hateful) declarations during the presidential run, such as “minorities have to bend down to the majority… The minorities [should] either adapt or simply vanish” (cited in Maisonnave, 2018). He won a runoff against Fernando Haddad, a professor of political science and former minister of education from the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, henceforth PT). Haddad replaced Luis Inácio Lula da Silva just three weeks ahead of the first round of elections. Lula, an ex-president of Brazil, had launched his candidacy from prison and was waiting for the Electoral Justice to decide about his future in the elections.

A question that we may equally ask political science and sociolinguistics is: How did a candidate with an extremist discourse, relatively unknown in the national political debate up to his mediatized remarks in 2014 – when he told Maria do Rosario, his colleague in the House of Representatives, “I'm not going to rape you, because you're very ugly” – was projected to the post of executive chief of a country that seemed to have consolidated its democratic process after a dictatorship that lasted 21 years (1964–1985)? Explanations about the victory of Bolsonaro cover different factors, such as the scenario of political instability triggered by the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, which brought to an end 13 years of hegemony of the PT in the executive; an economic crisis that augmented the political instability in 2015, when Ms. Rousseff began her second incumbency; the interference of the judiciary in the political field, epitomized by judge Sergio Moro's conducting of Lava Jato, or Car Wash criminal investigation, that resulted in Lula's arguable arrest in April 2018, in a process that was likely sped up to meet the electoral calendar; and finally, Bolsonaro's electoral marketing, which calibrated a populist discourse pitting the “people” against the “system,” the “man in the street” against the “oligarchs,” the “good citizen” (cidadão de bem) against “the perverts from the left.”

In addition to articulating this set of binary oppositions, Bolsonaro's electoral marketing disseminated them through an intricate network of circulation of messages – a process of dissemination first enacted in hierarchically positioned WhatsApp groups, then recycled on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram interactions.¹ According to Cesarino (2018, 2019), who has ethnographically studied these digital groups, Bolsonaro's marketing campaign created the “Bolsosphere,” a pun on words she created to single out a networked sphere of discourse circulation that is alternative to the traditional circuits and channels of communication in electoral campaigns. The latter primarily relies on the time allotted to parties for propaganda on the TV and radio, as well as on the news, editorials, and opinion articles in corporate media outlets and their citations. During the campaign, Bolsonaro had only 8 seconds of party propaganda on the TV, as opposed to 2 minutes and 23 seconds by Lula/Haddad, and 5 minutes and 32 seconds by Geraldo Alckmin. Yet Bolsonaro's campaign ingenuously bypassed this circuit by using digital media – and especially by engineering a massive distribution of memes and factually distorted news through WhatsApp, thereby producing an image of authority for himself as a former army captain who spoke, dressed, and behaved like “the people.”

Even though Bolsonaro had been a legislator for 28 years, “passing as”² an outsider – or as someone from the “people” who was fighting the system – was fundamental for his electoral success. In the campaign, passing as a member of the people largely depended on invoking certain models of language and the sociocultural order and on commoditizing particular semiotic and linguistic forms that emulated these models. In this study, I argue that passing as “a man from the people” was a marketing strategy that simultaneously relied on a recent process of enregisterment in Brazil and benefited from the emerging enregistered tokens by branding them as nationalist icons to be entextualized in a circuit of political and economic transnational interests.

In his discussion of the conditions for the emergence of the phonolexical register of Standard British English in the 18th century, which went from being inexistent in the 17th century to becoming the commodified semiotic register of today, Agha (2007) argues that processes of enregisterment are closely tied to the sociohistorical production of semiotic value. Agha's narration of the sociohistorical formation of this register also means that, after a certain point in the history of Britain, people could mutually focus their attention to a “thing” – a standard pronunciation – that previously did not exist as a nameable category. I would like to retain this idea of focal attention to an emerging register that became distinct over time because I believe that this point is the basis of the success of Bolsonaro's electoral marketing. In a short period of time, Bolsonaro went from being unknown in the national political debate to being an emblem for sectors of the population dissatisfied with the “system” to currently being a far-right populist widely cited in Brazilian and international discussions of politics.

Processes of enregisterment are responsible for historically creating links between communicative forms and their indexical values (e.g., images of person, social organization, social time or social space). Seen as “a moment-interval of a process of enregisterment” (Agha, 2007, p. 80), a register is thus a cultural crystallization of indexical associations between certain traits of language and particular images of people. With a minor or larger durability, a register assigns a certain degree of stability and coherence to how a group of interactants mutually orient themselves through a chain of semiotic encounters.

This study thus investigates how Bolsonaro's campaign drew from, and participated in, the enregisterment of semiotic and linguistic forms that have figured in contemporary Brazil as a register of the “people.” The popular register that Bolsonaro invoked in his campaign and has recycled in his early executive activity is selective and contrastive. It is selective because this metasemiotic process has singled out certain forms of talking about the political situation (e.g., critiques of politically correct language) that evoke the image of a segment of the population. Yet in Bolsonaro's populist strategy, this index of a fragment is projected as representing an entire population. It is contrastive because this process of linguistic and semiotic reanalysis is embedded in a demarcation of boundaries differentiating this segment of a population from an enemy. The PT, artists, public teachers, China, Venezuela, the Arab World, and other “enemies” would all figure as an existential threat and a “constitutive outside” (Cesarino, 2019) to the register recently produced in Brazil.

Empirically, my analysis focuses on the historical conditions for the emergence of the populist register that the Bolsonaro campaign appropriated and commoditized in its digital strategy of recruiting voters. I looked at the social media accounts of Jair Bolsonaro and his three sons, Eduardo, Flávio, and Carlos Bolsonaro, in addition to news articles and opinion papers in the media about Bolsonaro's campaign and about the polarization in the Brazilian political field in the past four years. Like other analysts of country branding (Tovar, this volume) and “digital populism” (Cesarino, 2019), I have looked at indirect evidence of the discursive patterns of populist branding in Bolsonaro's campaign. As Tovar (this volume) discusses in her account of the reinvention of a German brand in the World Cup of 2006, “branding is usually not a democratic process (Varga, 2013) but happens behind closed doors” (Tovar, this volume p. 186). This is exactly the case of Bolsonaro's “digital populism,” as Cesarino (2019) terms it. For Cesarino, the intricate mechanism of creation and replication of messages in the Bolsosphere must have involved “some kind of ‘science of populism’.” The systematic and hierarchic chains of diffusion of messages, as well as their “manual for reading and replicating” or communicable projection (Briggs, 2011), seem to have been carefully planned. Cesarino suggests that the “recursivity between theory and practice” of the science of populism enacted in Bolsonaro's electoral strategy “becomes more powerful as it is fractalized across the digital landscape: anyone, anywhere with an internet connection is able to quickly and effectively pick up these discursive patterns and reproduce them intuitively.”

In what follows, I continue by parsing out a folk rationalization of Bolsonaro's electoral marketing. Based on this metasemiotic sketch, I then move to explaining the two main opposing populist strategies in the Brazilian elections, in addition to showing how these populist accounts projected brands of Brazil for different transnational circuits. After this, I unpack a semiotic chain from which Bolsonaro drew the metacommunicative force of his populist tropes. Finally, I discuss the accomplishments and pitfalls of Bolsonaro's main branding trope, “Brazil above everything. God above everyone” – a slogan that is lodged in the same citational circuit as Donald Trump's main branding of the United States, “Make America great again.”

Populism and electoral marketing

Rationalizations about Bolsonaro's communicative marketing are legion. I will single out the justifications for Bolsonaro's electoral efficacy expressed in an editorial of “World of Marketing” website (Mello, 2018). I chose this article because it iconizes comments about the register, communicability, and diffusion of Bolsonaro's talk. Written by Bruno Mello, the editorial finds similarities in the campaigns of Obama, Trump, and Bolsonaro. Their common trait was engaging with “digital social media as the stage for mobilizing electors.” For the editorial, the most successful Brazilian example is Bolsonaro. “Without having support from a great Digital Marketing professional or large sums of money,” Mello (2018) says, Bolsonaro was successful in communicating his discourse and being massively voted for three reasons: “(1) the engagement of a large part of his voters on the digital environment; (2) not only defending the same ideas (sic) but also expressing them on a clear, simple, sometimes rigid manner; (3) regularly getting closer and talking to his audience, both online and offline (note the storm of selfies with the then candidate).”

The editorial also argues that Obama, Trump, and Bolsonaro's campaigns “share a similarity beyond the digital: their followers and potential electors were evidently going against their opponents' proposals and/or dissatisfied with the course of the country.” To communicate his revolt against the “system,” Bolsonaro's resources would have been only “a keyboard, a mouse and a smartphone connected to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp.” These inexpensive gadgets would have allowed for Bolsonaro's “shooting his beliefs.” With the aid of his son Carlos, Bolsonaro became a digital influencer. His live transmissions informally took place in his living room, “where a Brazilian flag was taped in an improvised manner and a mosquito killer racket was laid on the table.” Figure 1.1, extracted from Bolsonaro's Twitter, displays the table where his live transmissions take place.³ The mosquito racket and other elements in the living room – like the jury-rigged flag and the clay jug – point to his branding as a man from the peopl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Disclaimer
• Introduction
• PART I: Nationalism and country branding
• PART II: Place and country branding
• Index