1st Edition

Donald J. Trump's Presidency Communicating Race and Migration

Edited By Chuka Onwumechili Copyright 2024

    This book captures Donald J. Trump’s presidency by addressing the remarkable tropes that defined that period. It offers research-based investigations of the communicative aspects of Trump’s presidency, with a focus on race, immigration, xenophobia, and social conflicts as they interact with communication.

    The book utilizes research data to capture critical moments of the presidency. Chapters examine metadiscourse during President Trump’s press events, where he accused the media of “Nasty Question” and “Fake News”, offer computational framing analysis to expose the communication of racism and xenophobia in US-Mexico cross-border wall discourses, and provide critical textual analysis of select episodes of CW’s critically acclaimed TV show Jane the Virgin, exposing how citizenship, or lack thereof shapes one’s relationship to the state and surrounding communities. They also offer textual analysis to demonstrate how a predominantly White newsroom differs from a newsroom that is racially diverse, against the backdrop of the coverage of two politically charged issues of Black Lives Matter and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and explore interdisciplinary concepts related to understanding immigrants’ and sojourners’ believability evaluation of disinformation.

    Donald J. Trump's Presidency will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of communication studies, political communication, media and cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and political science, while also appealing to anyone interested in the communicative aspects of Trump’s presidency and American politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Howard Journal of Communications.

    Introduction—Donald Trump’s America: Communicating the Seeds of Racism, Xenophobia, & Persistent Conflict
    Chuka Onwumechili

    1. “Nasty Question” and “Fake News”: Metadiscourse as a Resource for Denying Accusations of Racism in Donald Trump’s Presidential Press Events
    Natasha Shrikant and Sylvia Sierra

    2. Communicating Racism and Xenophobia in the Era of Donald Trump: A Computational Framing Analysis of the US-Mexico Cross-Border Wall Discourses
    Yowei Kang and Kenneth C. C. Yang

    3. Alba the Undocumented: Immigration Law and Citizenship Excess in Jane the Virgin
    Litzy Galarza

    4. (Re) Framing Legal Vulnerability: Identity, Abjection, and Resistance among DACAmented Immigrants in the Era of Trumpism
    Heidy Sarabia, Laura Zaragoza and Jesus Limon Guzman

    5. The Media and Race in the Trump Era: An Analysis of Two Racially Different Newsrooms’ Coverage of BLM and DACA
    Chamian Y. Cruz and Lynette Holman

    6. First-Generation Immigrants’ and Sojourners’ Believability Evaluation of Disinformation
    Solyee Kim and Hyoyeun Jun

    Biography

    Chuka Onwumechili is Professor of Communications at Howard University, USA and Editor-In-Chief of the Howard Journal of Communications (since 2015). He authored/co-edited more than 12 books and numerous academic articles. His most recent work is developing the African Cultural Theory of Communication (ACToC).