Repertori retorici e negoziazione culturale nei racconti di vita di rifugiati : lingua franca e implicazioni ideologiche

This chapter analyses the storytelling performance of an asylum seeker speaking in English for an international audience and recorded on a video released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The primary purpose of the study is to investigate the rhetorical structuring of the narrative in an ethnopoetic perspective (Hymes 2003), and to identify the presence (or, even more significantly, marked absence) of dialogic signs of intercultural negotiation deployed in the process of conveying to a culturally diverse audience a highly culturally situated story embedded in a personal narrative of displacement. At the same time, the study also intends to contribute to the current debate on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) by addressing the issue of the inherently situated nature of ELF, and of the political and ideological implications of an ELF approach to intercultural communication in both asymmetric and (programmatically) symmetric power situations. The video selected for the analysis was retrieved from the UNHCR Youtube channel and is part of a series called Storytelling: through the eyes of Refugees designed to make refugees’ stories known to the wide public and to legitimise refugees as a category of people endowed with agentivity and self-determination, and with the power of contributing to the discursive construction of their own role and status. Because of their global outreach, these videos qualify as instances of ELF usage in a broad international context and are eminently suited to the investigation and discussion of ELF approaches to conventionally asymmetric institutional communication.