Antiamerikanismus als Ungleichheitssemantik. Eine Mixed Methods Untersuchung zu rhetorischen Funktionen antiamerikanischer Vorurteile

In current research anti-Americanism is often conceptualized as a prejudice. Although this approach is a productive response to the conceptual problems of distinguishing anti-Americanism from legitimate criticism of the USA, it is not free from conceptual issues itself. Its common definitional components (aversion, irrationality/propositional falseness, and cognitive schema) do not provide satisfactory criteria for classifying utterances as prejudice. Such conceptions of anti-Americanism underrepresent a crucial characteristic of prejudiced speech acts: their functionality in the reproduction of discriminatory social relations. To describe any aversion, cognitive schema, or form of irrationality as prejudice necessarily implies that its expression leads to the discrimination or persecution of individuals or groups. Knappertsbusch develops a speech-act-theoretical notion of anti-Americanism which incorporates this aspect of language use: the rhetorical application of certain America-stereotypes as a means of reproducing and reinforcing discriminatory symbolic boundaries. Drawing on quantitative survey data as well as qualitative interviews on different functional uses of current anti-Americanism in Germany are presented: reinforcing ethnocentric national identity constructions, deflecting anti-racist criticism, bridging or concealing fractures within national identity (normalizing the Holocaust). These analyses also provide new insight into the correlations between anti-Americanism, racism and anti-Semitism.