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Recent research on the discursive construction of national identity

Hsu, Chien-Jung. 2014. The construction of national identity in Taiwan’s media, 1896–2012. Leiden: Brill. Khosravinik, Majid. 2015. Discourse, identity and legitimacy: Self and other in representations of Iran’s nuclear programme. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Identity has been one of the focal points of discourse studies for several decades. From the late 1950s to 1960s, varied sources as Goffman and Foucault contradicted the Western notion of the self as separate, bounded, and steady. On the one hand, Goffman (1956) argued that identity is performative rather than a fixed referent that is expressed, and a matter of continuous interactive ‘work’ and adjustment depending on context and audience. Foucault (1970/1966), on the other hand, articulated that the establishment of certain paradigms or epistémes, which shift through history, imply different conditions for discourse and identity. An example from his early career is the emergence of psychiatry and its system of differentiation – normalcy versus various illnesses – and its allocation of seemingly rational rights, obligations, and tasks. In these years, Karl W. Deutsch’s work on nationalism also came to emphasize the constitutive function that social communication plays for the shaping of national identity (e.g. Deutsch 1953). Often building on these foundations, one can see how the study of identity has come to take different approaches, one focusing on the performance of self and identity in the insitu communication between people; the other viewing identity more from a ‘helicopter view’ as the effect of quite muscular regimes of truth and discourse, which always tend to establish systems of differences, and which provide resources for control and selfcontrol. Specializations within discourse studies from the mid-1980s onwards, such as critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discursive psychology, have sought to bridge the micro and macro approaches (Gee 1999), so as to neither underestimate the importance of the global, capital-D discourses nor local discursive practices and their agentive potential for social change. Today, a research database search on identity and discourse renders thousands of hits. Once a concept has become so widely used, it is important to take stock of some of the prior developments and of new research. In this review essay, I will discuss and contrast two recent publications dealing with identity, discourse and media: Chien-Jung Hsu’s