ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we shall examine representations of ‘offshore’ as both a place that is geographically situated, far removed, on the margins of reality, and an abstract site of interrogations in which national and international laws are invoked, imposed and negotiated around investment/financial scandals. Thus, in Bordieuan terms (1993), the implicated social field and habitus are those of players or agents involved in the large-scale capital movement to a global financial ‘el dorado’ away from regulators and a tax man with nation-state authority. In order to do this, we shall explore Appadurai’s (1990) notion of mediascape as ‘the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information’ (298–9), which is the engine that powers events like the Panama Papers scandal. Within this, we shall analyse varied responses to the Panama Papers and other recent scandals from countries around the world and identify ways in which these responses may challenge the feasibility of a ‘post-national sociolinguistics’ (cf. Heller 2011).