Discourses of Borders and the Nation in the USA

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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

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