Re-contextualizing political discourse: An analysis of shifting spaces in songs used as a political tool

Abstract

This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization (Wodak&Fairclough 2010) of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire 2008 speech (cf. Will.i.am 2008). In Will.i.am’s music video “Yes, we can”, uploaded on YouTube under the username WeCan08, we can listen to a song whose lyrics are made of different extracts from Obama’s speech.This type of communicative strategy results in a multiple re-contextualization of the political speech. The effectiveness of the musical video can be explained by identifying it as a blended mental space (Fauconnier& Turner 2002) incorporating elements of the text-world, the music-world and visual-world.