Chapter 15

Translanguaging the hero online

This interdisciplinary chapter focuses on the digital translanguaging practices of Qatar-based people’s construction of H.H. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the current Emir of Qatar, as a hero during the blockade that was imposed on the country in June 2017 and lasted until January 2021. A translingual and multimodal corpus comprising tweets and songs composed and performed by the super-diverse population of Qatar during the first year of the blockade is analyzed in the context of resemiotization, and in an appraisal framework with a focus on attitude, namely the ways whereby feelings are seen as a system of meanings. The findings suggest that Sheikh Tamim is constructed as a political and moral hero (Allison, Goethals & Kramer 2016: 5) via a bottom up translanguaged praise of his agency and communal focus evident in his political and diplomatic actions. This praise is realized via emotional stance (affect), which translates into the expression of positive feelings pertinent to his personality, such as love, appreciation, gratitude, and ethics (judgment). The latter is related to attitudes toward Sheikh Tamim’s behavior during the blockade (admiration and praise). At the same time, the role of language ecology including translanguaging in the superdiverse (Vertovec 2007) context of Qatar is examined in the construction of the discourse of Sheikh Tamim’s heroism. More specifically, it is argued that, while English is used referentially, in order to refer to Sheikh Tamim’s achievements and character, languages like Standard Arabic, and Arabic dialects, are used in a more personalized way to either address him directly or to represent his thoughts in the form of direct speech. In this sense, the chapter suggests a new take on translanguaged ecologies through their association with attitudes.