1st Edition
Discourses of Borders and the Nation in the USA A Discourse-Historical Analysis
This book introduces an innovative critical analysis of borders in contemporary political discourse, using examples from the Trump presidency and early stages of the Biden presidency to explore how borders are used as mechanisms of power to invoke different notions of national identity. // The volume considers border as discursive construct, reflecting on their importance in the construction and expression of national identity across different forms of modern political discourse. Employing a framework informed by Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach, Demata examines how analyzing discourse from the Trump and Biden presidencies can reveal unique insights into how politicaians and other stakeholders use borders to recontextualize historical discourses of national identity and employ discursive strategies of inclusion and exclusion in promoting the idea of “the nation.” In adopting an approach which situates these discourses within their historical and socio-cultural contexts, the volume helps to further bridge the gap between different disciplines toward offering a multi-faceted understanding of notions of borders and national identity in contemporary political language. // This book will be of interest to students and scholars in discourse analysis, language and power, language and politics, political science, and border studies.
Table of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Borders, Nations and Security in the Age of Populism
Theoretical framework and methodology: the Discourse-Historical Approach
Borders and the Nation: Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion
From bordered to borderless – and back. Borders, populism and the politics of security (and insecurity)
Chapter 2 The Trump Wall. The Discourse and the Aesthetics of Exclusion
The border wall: security and the nation
The Beautiful Wall. Borders and the Discourse of Real Estate
Branding Trump and the Trump Wall
Chapter 3 The Progressive Rhetoric of Borders
Democrats and "open borders"
From nation separation to family separation. Borders and the strength of the "nation of immigrants"
The modern (and effective) border
Conclusions
References
Biography
Massimiliano Demata is Associate Professor of English at the University of Turin. He was a Fulbright scholar in Yale (1999) and Indiana University (2014) and has held Visiting Professorships at Saarland University (2020), Sciences Po Lyon (2021), and OTH Regensburg (2022). He is the co-editor of the Journal of Language and Discrimination and has published on populist discourse, Trump’s rhetoric, metaphors of the nation and social media discourse.
"This is a thought-provoking book on the notion of border. By relying on Anderson's notion of 'imagined community', Demata successfully explain how the border is an ideological construct. To do so, he explores Donald Trump's aesthetic conceptualisation of "The Wall" as a commodity and of Democrats' appeal to security and moral values. While different constructions can be found, Demata convincingly shows how the notion of 'border' is exploited in political discourse for legitimising the existence of a (differently-constructed) nation".
Laura Filardo-Llamas, Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics, Universidad de Valladolid
"This book contains an extensive case study about ‘Trump’s beautiful wall’, promoted and branded as unique, as protecting the US from so-called illegal immigration. Borders are contested in this case; on the one hand, ‘closed borders’ are promoted, on the other, ‘open borders’, with a range of different arguments, some of which are necessarily fallacious. However, both sides promise security and border management. Theoretically and methodologically, this book is an outstanding example of context-dependent qualitative discourse-historical analysis which allows tracing Trump’s propaganda step-by -step, both visually and textually. Such differentiated and detailed case studies allow understanding and explaining the success of far-right ethno-nationalist populist body- and border politics, integrated into a populist politics of fear. A must-read for scholars and graduate students alike".
Ruth Wodak, Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies, Lancaster University/University Vienna
"As populist and neoliberal discourses contend to define a post-global world, Demata reminds us how borders—including the plights of those attempting to
cross them—can serve as symbols of social order as well as proxies for political struggle. Although brief, his study offers important insights into how the recontextualisation of political discourses, namely, of family values, the aesthetics of exclusion, and the neoliberal ethics of modernity, contribute to ideological discursive formation and contemporary political language."Chris Featherman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Language in Society 52 (2023)
