The chapter is concerned with metaphor and focusses specifically on war metaphors in political discourses. The cognitive mechanisms at work in metaphor are described with an emphasis on frames as the unit of conceptual organisation that gets mapped in political metaphors. Recent experimental studies demonstrating the framing effects of metaphor are discussed. The war frame is described to include discussion of intertextuality as a means of accessing it. Three case studies are then presented exploring war metaphors in discourses of Covid-19, Brexit and immigration. Analogies with the first and second world wars in particular are highlighted and critiqued. The chapter defines and discusses extreme metaphors illustrated through examples in which immigrants are compared to animals and closes with a discussion of how readers may resist extreme metaphors.

The chapter addresses attentional distribution in conceptualisations of events. It argues that language directs attention over particular portions of an event-structure selecting certain elements for focal attention while conceptually backgrounding other elements. The ideological implications of attentional distribution are discussed with reference to mystification whereby either human agency in or the human impact of harmful social actions is obscured. Two case studies are presented. The first considers action-chain profiling in media coverage of fatalities on the Gaza border. It shows how attentional distributions evoked by intransitive, passive and agentless passive constructions as well as nominalisations conceptually background those responsible for the fatalities. It further shows the conceptual means by which the impact of violent actions may be mitigated. The second considers path-profiling in immigration discourse. It shows how different verb choices serve to highlight humanitarian motivations for migration versus the impact of migration on host countries and considers the role of metonymy in legitimating hostile immigration policies.

The chapter examines co-text images in multimodal texts. It highlights the increasing importance of images in political discourse. The intersemiotic relations which language and image may enter into are described with an emphasis placed on intersemiotic convergence. Two areas of multimodal research in Cognitive CDA are identified: multimodal constructions and multimodal metaphor. In connection with multimodal constructions, the chapter considers news photographs and shows how news photographs and their captions may coincide with respect to the conceptual dimensions of schematisation, viewpoint and attentional distribution. In connection with multimodal metaphor, the chapter shows how metaphors expressed verbally may also be expressed visually or cross-modally in verbal and visual components of the text. The role of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in accessing source-frames is highlighted. Two case studies are presented. The first considers visual and cross-modal examples of war and animal metaphors in immigration discourse. The second considers body-poses as a particular source of metaphoricity in images.

The chapter focusses on schematisation – the image-schematic structuring of events in conceptualisation. Image schemas are defined as representations of recurrent patterns of experience which are called up in discourse to constitute our basic understanding of the situation or event described. The different domains of experience in which image schemas arise are considered alongside their ideological role in the discursive construction of events. Two case studies are presented. The first examines the motion event in media discourses of immigration. It highlights a number of conceptual parameters along which conceptualisations of immigration may depart from a basic model of motion, including in manner of motion and configuration of the ground, quantification and plexity in the figure, and the rate and iteration of the motion encoded, and considers the implications of these departures for ideology and the legitimation of hostile immigration policies. The second focusses on schematisation in media coverage of a Black Lives Matter protest. In a comparative analysis of two texts it shows the patterns of conceptualisation implicated in realising the protest paradigm in media reporting.

This chapter illustrates how the United Kingdom’s distinctive understanding of sovereignty combined with New Labour’s vision of the United Kingdom’s place in the global economy to shape the government’s approach to human trafficking. Targeting trafficking for sexual exploitation, the government cracked down on migrant sex workers and domestic prostitution. It also associated labour trafficking with illegal working and cast society as a victim of exploitation along with individuals who had been trafficked. The chapter describes New Labour’s selective acceptance of European Union and Council of Europe antitrafficking instruments; it adopted those instruments that reinforced the United Kingdom’s borders while avoiding those that gave rights to victims of trafficking. By equating its action plan for tackling human trafficking with the abolition of the slave trade, the government elevated its antitrafficking policies to a moral crusade.

In the last few decades, governments have increasingly sought to relocate away from their territorial limits border practices that serve to identify, filter, and, if necessary, prevent foreigners’ crossings into their national space. This shift is facilitated by digital innovations that offer new opportunities for making migrants legible from afar, miles away from the border. Yet the turn to emerging technologies is not the preserve of governments. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been using digital technologies, including biometrics data, for several decades. For UNHCR these are becoming an essential tool in accounting for the populations under its protection. This chapter explores this development. The first part surveys the deterritorialization of border controls in state practice with a focus on the enabling role of biometrics and digitization in that process. Then, it demonstrates how the use of biometrics by UNHCR maps onto these states’ practices. The second part considers the consequences of UNHCR’s practices surrounding the biometric registration of refugees, the risks posed by the collection of biometric data in the refugee context, and how the institutional and structural conditions in which UNHCR operates, especially with regard to consent, accountability mechanisms, and legal safeguards, may undermine refugees’ control over their data.

This chapter argues that if anti-sweatshop activists want to help workers they should specifically target and boycott slave labor sweatshops such as those in China with forced Uyghur labor; advocate and monitor “ethical branding”; buy goods made in the Third World; pay children to go to school to reduce child labor; promote the process of development; and advocate for relaxing immigration restrictions.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the structural constraints and opportunities for the populist radical right (PRR) in Latin America. Unlike Western Europe, material values are still of vital importance in many Latin American countries because of high levels of inequality in the region. This represents a major constraint for the emergence of the PRR, and only some parties have been able to overcome it. The author argues that the growth of the PRR relies on three factors: the appeal of the PRR’s hardline discourses, the mobilization of voters dissatisfied with sexual and reproductive rights and secularization, and a crisis of representation among the traditional parties, who are painted by PRR leaders as a corrupt elite.

The nationalist element of Brexit populism had an entrenched ethnocentric character that was capable of breaking out in the in the form of racism. By 2016 overt racism had become taboo in public, but Brexitspeak had the linguistic means to dog whistle it. The new racism also enlarged the sense of ‘racism’ to cover refugee migrants entering the UK who were not dark-skinned. The sources of racism in the UK are diverse and subject to debate. In this chapter the focus is on the likely impact of racist demagoguery in generating and sustaining long-term racist attitudes. The example of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech is scrutinised in detail. But Powellism persisted well beyond the 1960s and 1970s: twenty years on it motivated the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the age of the internet, Powell was a legitimising icon among neo-Nazi networks and appeared in website videos quoting and visualising his notorious speech. But veneration of Powell also remained apparent among right-wing Conservative politicians, activists and writers, and in their networking with ultra-right individuals.

The notion of identity plays a central role in contemporary culture, both as the core of individualism and as the proclaimed principle of nationalist populist movements – and thus also of Brexit ideology. To have a national identity implies being different from other persons, groups, nations and, in Brexitspeak, the EU. This means that Brexitism is not just a British phenomenon, but part of the wave of national populism that has swept across Europe and the Americas. This chapter includes a survey of European identitarian movements and of the far-right writers whose ideas were in tune with them. It was immigrants that were made into a threatening ‘other’ in the pro-Brexit campaigns, and the EU was blamed for increased immigration. While other factors, such as economic deprivations, levels of immigration in particular locations are part of the story, it can be argued, as this book does, that it was demagoguery targeting immigrants – loudly amplified by the popular press – that sufficiently persuaded voters to vote Leave.

In this introductory chapter, an invitation is provided to begin a journey into the intricacies of Black Caribbean immigrant literacies through the use of Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, as exceptional Black imaginaries already inscribed in the world. Through the adept depiction of racialization and transracialization steeped in the Black experience in the US as juxtaposed against the notion of Black immigrants as a ‘model minority,’ the necessity for examining race in relation to the languaging and semiotizing of Black Caribbean immigrants is outlined. Presenting a brief overview of the emerging global project focused on racialized language, this chapter lays the groundwork for the painting of a compelling portrait of the holistic literacies of Black Caribbean immigrant youth. By signaling the attention to an ultimate positioning of flourishing as a necessary imperative for and alternative to rethinking literacies based on ‘success,’ the chapter concludes with a focus on solidarity between Black Caribbean and other populations as a key impetus for this work.

In this chapter, I acknowledge the intertwined histories of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies across the Black diaspora. In doing so, I draw from the notion of ‘transcendent literacy’ to attend to the long legacy of languaging emerging out of the Black race and reaching across the Black diaspora while also lamenting the invented illiteracy often imposed in characterizations of Black peoples worldwide. Acknowledging the traditional lineage of ‘Diaspora Literacy’ in making visible interconnections across Black peoples within and beyond the US, I then present Caribbean Englishes across the Black diaspora, describing the languaging, Englishes, and literacies of English-speaking Afro-Caribbean students in the Caribbean and in the US. Based on this discussion, I call for a silencing of the historical tradition of invented illiteracy used to characterize Black peoples across the diaspora and invite a strengthening of accessible knowledges surrounding the rich literate and linguistic heritages they inherently possess. Through this discussion, it is possible to understand the broader transnational contexts influencing racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing in Black immigrant literacies and thus, the inherently induced economic bases for racialization of language.

In this chapter, I begin by complicating how Black immigrants’ perception as a ‘model minority’ in the US creates a challenge for equitably engaging with their literacies and languaging as a function of schooling. Joining the conversation on immigrant and transnational literacies, I present foundational language and literacy research in the US that has functioned as a backdrop against which Black Caribbean immigrants’ literacies and languaging are considered. To situate Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies within its broader contexts, I then discuss education, migration, and cultures across the Black diaspora addressing the historical and contemporary educational landscape of Black people in the Caribbean. I further accomplish this situational placement of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies through a discussion of the historical and contemporary socio-educational landscape of Black immigrants in the US. Through this broadly painted portrait operating at the interstices of the educational, racial, historical, social, linguistic, and religious domains in the lives of Black Caribbean peoples and specifically youth, this chapter serves as a nuanced and contextual backdrop against which to understand the analyses of Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s language and literacies presented in this book.

In this chapter, I present findings from interpretive analyses of the data as they relate to the multiliteracies and translanguaging practices engaged in by six Black Caribbean immigrant English-speaking youth across their Bahamian and Jamaican Caribbean home countries and the US. Specifically, I contextualize these findings within (decolonizing) interpretive analyses that clarify the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies informing students’ multiliteracies and translanguaging practices. This chapter shows how the literacies of Black immigrant youth are enacted holistically by adeptly illustrating the languaging associated with these literacies and the ideologies influencing these literacies. Based on these findings, I propose and discuss the framework of semiolingual innocence for understanding how elements of multiliteracies and translanguaging practices as well as the raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic ideologies intersected to clarify the literacies leveraged by Black Caribbean immigrant youth. In turn, through semiolingual innocence emerging from transracialization of the Black immigrant as an analytical prism, I invite a reinscribing of the innocence of Black youth, whose ancestors have for centuries leveraged semiolingually, sans white gaze, their multiliteracies and semiotics for agentively reading and writing themselves into the world. Moreover, I argue for a semiolingual innocence of all youth, made possible through the cultivation of translanguaging and transsemiotizing imaginary presents and futures.

In this chapter, I synthesize the findings from the study presented in the book. Reflecting on these findings, I then identify and discuss recommendations for instantiating the translanguaging imaginaries of all youth through a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence, sans white gaze, as a potentially vibrant literate characteristic of Black Caribbean immigrant students specifically, and also, of all humans. The scholarly recommendations proposed outline future directions for research that invite intersectionally and transdisciplinary driven investigations into how youth’s holistic literacies across geographies, languages, races, and cultures function as disparate pieces of one interdependent puzzle in the problem-solving necessary to flourish and to design imaginary presents and futures, using the meaning-making undergirding their translanguaging practices. I outline also practical recommendations useful for researchers, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who wish to support Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s holistic literacies. The recommendations proposed also allow all youth whose language and raciosemiotic architecture can allow them, through these holistic literacies, to design translanguaging futures as new beings engaging transraciolinguistically, in solidarity. I conclude with a painting of liberatory Caribbean imaginaries as a version of what this notion of literacy and language teaching and learning might look like and of what it means to embark on a collective return to inonsans jan nwè.