Rehumanizing the migrant: the translated past as a resource for refashioning the contemporary discourse of the (radical) left

The paper interrogates how the (radical) left conceptualizes migrants and refugees and asks whether its discourse resists or reproduces dominant, institutionally driven narratives. Framed by Foucault’s notions of discourse, power, and the “regime of truth,” it posits that left-wing activism often becomes complicit in mainstream rhetoric through the contagion of official language. The study’s purpose is to expose these discursive patterns in left-wing internet sources and to explore whether historical models—particularly modern English translations and commentaries of ancient Greek texts—can offer alternative, more humane ways of speaking about outsiders to the polity. This matters because language shapes knowledge, power, and policy, and rehumanizing discourse is essential to counter dehumanizing classifications that affect migrants’ and refugees’ treatment.

The study draws on Foucauldian discourse theory (Foucault 1972/2002; 1980; 1984) to conceptualize truth, knowledge, and power, emphasizing how dominant institutions shape regimes of truth about migration. It engages prior corpus-based research documenting media framings: refugees/asylum seekers frequently quantified and labeled by origin (Baker & McEnery 2005; Baker et al. 2008), number-centric reporting that fuels “crisis” narratives (Fotopoulos & Kaimaklioti 2016; White/EJN 2015; Stierl et al. 2019), and public skepticism of statistics (Davies 2017; Katwala et al. 2014). It contrasts left-leaning and mainstream hierarchies in the immigrant–refugee distinction (Lawlor & Tolley 2017) and discusses the effects of terminology on empathy and criminalization (Hoops & Braitman 2019; Kansteiner 2018). For alternative models, it references classical antiquity and its receptions, including treatments of exiles/refugees with agency and honor (Gray 2016; Roisman 1984).

Data comprise two corpora from the Genealogies of Knowledge project. Primary: an Internet Corpus of left-wing outlets (2,834,468 tokens) including Activist Post, Discover Society, Impolitikal, Information Clearing House, Left Flank, Left Foot Forward, Libcom.org, Mother Jones, New Left Project, Open Democracy, ROAR Magazine, Salvage Zone, The Nation, UK Indymedia, Viewpoint Magazine. Secondary: a Greek-English Corpus of 73 books (6,966,050 tokens), largely modern English (re)translations of and commentaries on ancient Greek texts (e.g., Thucydides, Herodotus; plus commentaries by George Grote). The analysis proceeded by: (1) generating and manually scanning full frequency lists (rather than imposing cutoffs) to identify items within the semantic field of outsiders to the polity (e.g., migrant(s), refugee(s), exile(s), immigrant(s), asylum, foreigner(s), metics, barbarian(s), etc.), and revealing ancillary vocabularies (e.g., undocumented, stateless, passport, visa, noncitizen, citizenship-stripping). (2) Using Genealogies tools (concordancer; Mosaic for collocation visualization using MI3 and column frequency; Metafacet for metadata-based filtering) to explore positional collocates and distribution across sources. (3) Conducting qualitative close reading of concordance lines to assess stance and framing (e.g., scare quotes, neologisms like illegalized). In the Internet Corpus, key searches included migrant (523 instances), migrants (828), refugee (349 lines in one search) and refugees (635), with attention to significant collocates such as crisis (refugee crisis), workers (migrant workers), and legal status terms (undocumented, irregular, illegalized). In the Greek-English Corpus, refugee(s) appeared 32 times in total; exiles (503) and exile (503) were examined, focusing on exiles to capture agency-related patterns. Limitations of tooling (e.g., tokenizing asylum seekers vs asylum-seekers; Mosaic’s itemization) were noted and mitigated via manual checks and Metafacet filtering.

- Left-wing Internet discourse frequently reproduces mainstream framings: (a) “refugee crisis” is widely used, often uncritically. In a set of 349 lines for refugee, crisis was the most significant collocate; 61 of those lines explicitly featured the collocation. (b) Migrants are primarily cast in economic terms: a search on migrant (523 instances) showed workers as the most significant collocate in R1 and R2, yielding patterns like migrant (domestic/sex/farm) workers, migrant labor, migrant economies; 143/523 instances involved workers/worker/farmworkers/migrant-worker, concentrated especially in The Nation and Salvage Zone. (c) Refugees are framed as fleeing and linked to UNHCR (R1 collocates include fleeing, unhcr), reinforcing a humanitarian/victim narrative. (d) Migrants are framed through legal/administrative labels: undocumented (≈20 L1 occurrences), irregular (≈12), illegalized (≈6), illegal (≈5), placing them in a law-and-order discourse and contributing to criminalization. (e) Both refugees and migrants are repeatedly quantified (counts, rates, graphs) and categorized by origin/religion (e.g., Syrian, Palestinian, Muslim; also lists of source countries), feeding dehumanization and crisis framings and undermining solidarity. - Despite critical intent, some left sources acknowledge the contagion of institutional language; scare quotes and neologisms (illegalized) appear but can be unwieldy or limited in impact. Salvage Zone stands out for critiquing leftist as well as mainstream framings, yet still navigates the constraints of intelligibility. - Greek-English Corpus offers alternative models: refugees and exiles display agency (refugees adopt, settle, escape, occupy; exiles organize, return, influence political outcomes), and hosts sometimes extend privileges for ethical and strategic reasons (e.g., Athenians with allied exiles). Exiles are treated as autonomous political agents, not passive victims, and can invoke ethical imperatives to shame hosts into action. - An exemplary contemporary left intervention (Discover Society, 2016) uses Aeschylus’s The Suppliants to reframe asylum as a democratic ethical imperative without quantifying or economizing migrants, modeling a rehumanizing discourse that leverages historical reception to challenge current regimes of truth.

The findings show that much of the (radical) left’s online discourse mirrors dominant institutional rhetoric: upholding the refugee vs economic migrant binary, adopting “crisis” framing, relying on legal-administrative labels, quantification, and origin-based categorization. This reproduces dehumanizing narratives and diminishes migrant/refugee agency, thereby undercutting the left’s own normative aims. At the same time, the analysis reveals discursive pressures: to remain intelligible within a field saturated by institutional vocabularies, left outlets often compromise linguistic alternatives. The Greek-English translations and commentaries demonstrate viable conceptualizations from classical antiquity that emphasize agency, mutual obligation, and political subjectivity of exiles/refugees. By drawing on such translated pasts—as in the Discover Society article invoking Aeschylus—contemporary actors can craft discourses that humanize, avoid reduction to numbers or legality frames, and engage ethical-political reasoning. This contributes to discourse studies and migration debates by evidencing the mechanisms of complicity and offering historically grounded rhetorical resources for reframing.

The study contributes evidence that left-wing Internet discourse commonly recycles mainstream dehumanizing frames: the “refugee crisis” label, economic/worker-centric views of migrants, legalistic categorization of migrants as undocumented/irregular/illegalized, frequent quantification, and nationality/religion labeling. In contrast, the Greek-English corpus reveals a tradition that attributes agency and political subjectivity to exiles/refugees and recognizes mutual ethical obligations, offering discursive resources to rehumanize migrants today. The paper demonstrates that translations and receptions of classical texts can inspire alternative languages with which to contest current regimes of truth. Future research could: (1) extend analysis to far-right sources and compare agency attribution and militarized metaphors; (2) examine multilingual corpora and non-Anglophone left discourses; (3) refine corpus tools to merge multiword expressions (e.g., asylum seekers) and better capture quantification patterns; (4) conduct longitudinal studies across outlets to track discursive shifts; and (5) investigate audience reception of historically anchored reframings.

- Corpus scope: Internet data limited to selected English-language left outlets; the left is heterogeneous and not exhaustively represented. - Tooling constraints: Mosaic treats variants like asylum seeker(s)/asylum-seekers as separate items; multiword expression handling may under/overestimate collocation significance. - Methodological focus: Manual selection from full frequency lists is interpretive; space constraints prevented deep dives into all patterns surfaced (e.g., mass vs migration). - Greek-English corpus interpretive layers: Patterns reflect translators’ and commentators’ receptions rather than original Greek texts; no distinction was made between main text and paratext in analysis. - The study emphasizes qualitative interpretation of concordance lines and visualizations rather than statistical testing of differences across outlets/time.