‘Abbiamo liberato un’islamica’: Deconstructing the argumentative legitimation of discriminatory attitudes against Silvia Romano

This paper aims to explore the argumentative legitimation of discriminatory attitudes against Silvia Romano on Italian newspapers front pages. A volunteer-aid worker and activist, Romano was kidnapped in northeast Kenya in 2018 and eventually released after 18 months of captivity. Upon her return to Italy, a jilbāb-covered Romano declared she converted to Islam while held hostage and changed her name to Aisha. Romano’s conversion triggered a wave of exclusionary rhetoric across Italian media and opened the dam to a deluge of misogynous and Islamophobic attacks against the newly liberated activist, accused of having betrayed Catholic religion and Italian culture. Our corpus comprises 86 front pages from mainstream Italian newspapers of different ideological backgrounds, collected during the first week after Romano’s release in May 2020. Following the agenda of Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies and drawing on van Leeuwen’s language of legitimation, we study the recontextualization of social practice on the front pages and the main argumentation strategies, namely topoi, that emerge on the basis of this recontextualization, ending up argumentatively legitimizing discriminatory attitudes against the intended target.