Rewriting the Refugee Identity in Alter/Native Spaces: Behrouz Boochani on Twitter

Over the past two decades, facing the intensification of the migrant crisis, the Australian government has carried out seemingly neo-colonial policies, by arbitrarily confining and detaining asylum seekers on the Pacific Islands of Manus and Nauru. In order to oppose these suppressive and exclusionary practices, subaltern subjects have engaged in virtual spaces to re-appropriate and reconceptualise their identity representation. These digital platforms have hereupon provided empowering epistemic resources, which have been mobilized to decolonise the imaginary that discriminatory discourses have imposed on oppressed individuals. The purpose of this article is to analyse, from a linguistic and semantic perspective, how the asylum seeker identity is discursively constructed within the Twittersphere, particularly by the Iranian- Kurdish journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani. The research draws on an epistemic subaltern perspective and relies on a triangulated methodology that combines: Corpus Linguistics, to elicit and analyse quantitative data from the research opportunistic Twitter Corpus; qualitative approaches of Political Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis, to single out thematic patterns that emerge within the counter narrative formulated by the refugee under analysis. The study has the scope of emancipating an Alter/Native standpoint and offer a different perspective through which approach the Australian refugee crisis.