“Qui a peur du lyce musulman?” Media representations of a Muslim school in France

摘要

The present article analyses a corpus of 151 journalistic texts reporting the controversies around the operation of a Muslim school in France during 2006-2007, at the eve of the presidential elections. The aim is to explore how journalistic representations of a Muslim school operate in relation to dominant textured images of France as a political community. Journalistic texts are analysed in terms of their “representational choices” and the discursive strategies through which they choreograph the “pan-semiotic” categories of language that make sense of this institution, as a school. The analyses show how journalistic texts enact competing discursive constructions of a political community, and how they deploy lexicogrammatical, metaphoric and metonymic elements of language to choreograph the scriptural space in relation to which the school is made sense of. The corpus bears testimony of the media's “definitional power” over semiotic categories, and how these are deployed in the broader negotiation of struggles over constituencies in the field of power politics.