Investigations on racism: contributions of French Semiotics

Abstract

In this twenty-first century, in the face of great technological advances, we still come across racist attitudes. Unfortunately, racism is present, daily, in the discursive practices of several societies. In this paper, we give a historical background of the term race and how its applications affected the discourse of an epoch. We attempt to understand, from this angle, how racism in relation to the black people has become possible and remains to this day. In order to address the transformations arising from the use of the term race, we will focus on the concepts of valence and value presented by the Tensive Semiotics developed in the studies of Fontanille and Zilberberg (2001). To the historical background of the concept race and address their use in speeches, we turn to the work of Mbembe (2012), Munanga (2000) Ianni (2004) and Bonciani (2016) and other researchers.

Keywords: Valence. Value. Paradigm. Race. Racism.