Disentangling time-spaces of migration: Chronotopes and racist subjectivities in ‘identity journalism’ in Poland and Czechia

Abstract

This article analyses the use of time and space in ‘identity journalism’ in Poland and Czechia. ‘Identity journalism’ is an emic term that valorises the construction of identities as journalism’s prerogative and enacts this by supplying news that amplifies views around which conservative communities coalesce. This article focuses on how identity journalism’s discourse on migration manufactures racist subjectivities. Theoretically, it employs the notion of a ‘chronotope’: a discursive construct that fuses time and space and, in so doing, produces subjectivities. By bringing together spatialities implied in the concept of ‘domopolitics’ with the ‘racialised temporalities’ of critical race theory, the article conceptualises three distinct chronotopes of migration: the ‘homeland’, the ‘extended home’, and the ‘(racialised) outside’. Empirically, it studies how these chronotopes figure in a corpus extracted from two online identity-journalistic media: the Polish wPolityce.pl (110 articles) and the Czech ParlamentniListy.cz (189 articles). The results of a Foucauldian discourse analysis reveal, firstly, that by defining the ‘homeland’ as a spatially fixed entity that persists through time, identity journalism reinforces racist subjectivities by limiting the community of ‘us’ mainly to those who share the same past and, therefore, ethno-racial characteristics. Secondly, by projecting the spatially fixed but demographically diverse ‘extended home’ into the dystopian future, identity journalism buttresses the racist presumption of incompatibility between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Finally, by casting the ‘(racialised) outside’ as spatially mobile but temporally affixed to the uncivilised past, it feeds into the view of racialised migrants as barbaric and threatening.