Barack Obama's transnational translation: A rhetoric of postmodern unity

This dissertation offers new insights into the state of cultural identity transformation in the transnational era and the rhetorical response of presidential hopeful Barack Obama as an agent of change. The analysis focuses on the practice of rhetoric as a response to the culturally situated self.;Obama's identity rhetoric serves as a new postmodern script of unity for the transnational scene. This dissertation offers four propositions in demonstrating a reintegrative form of postmodern rhetoric: (1) The transnational era is establishing the requisite antecedent conditions for identity transformation, (2) Obama's transnational identity rhetoric is indicative of a transnational fusion of centrisms. This fusion of centrisms is not bound to one cultural identity such as Afrocentricity, or Eurocentricity, but is instead drawn from the complexity of the transnational cultural scene, (3) Obama's identity serves as a representative anecdote for the United States, and (4) the rhetorical structure of Obama's rhetoric follows a human-centered frame and promotes the value of a multi-perspectival self in the transnational era.;Obama's initiative, asserted through his own transnational identity, is a reinscription of the dominant rhetoric of identity and offers consubstantiality for the rhetor of the transnational cultural scene. It is a postmodern script that is human-centered and intended to move the rhetorical narrative toward one of diversity in dialogue and away from the caustic conversations of ethnocentrisms. The goal of this dissertation is to understand the importance of Obama's achievement in promoting his postmodern rhetoric within the transnational scene.