Storytelling and Identity Construction in US Political Discourse

The volume investigates, from a diachronic perspective, the storytelling strategies constructing and construing the identities of political actors – whether activists, candidates or career politicians – and the discourse practices for raising public awareness and consensus in the United States from the 1960s onwards. Informed by systemic functional linguistics and critical multimodal discourse analysis and supported by an audio and video corpus constructed and annotated by the Author, it presents the results of research into different US political discourse genres, such as Black Church and lay sermons, Vice-/Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speeches and Inaugural Addresses, including their digital remediation, as well as other forms of web-mediated communication. The investigation is carried out not only in terms of the relationship between texts and contexts relating to the American Dream and Civil Rights Activism, but also with reference to the evolution of culture-bound master narratives and socio-discursive roles affecting the performance of individual, institutional and collective identities in the construction and legitimation of leadership. More specifically, the volume places a special focus on the transition from the televised and newspaper-reading society of the 20^th century to a digital society where, as a result of the ever-increasing impact of multimodal meaningmaking strategies, globalization and social media instant messaging, the practice of storytelling is in the process of being redefined and remediated: this entails a strategic relationship between master narratives and the construction of political identities in their interaction with the public. In these respects, by revisiting well-known territory in a compact, holistic way, the volume is of particular value to specialists in political discourse analysis, but it will also appeal to readers who wish to gain a critical understanding of how political identities and political narratives are co-constructed.