Emerging Americans: Newspapers, languages and contestations of national/ethnic identities

The demise of the nation-state as a source of political and cultural and economic power or its resurgence is continuously debated. The strength of our bonds to the nation-state are always being assessed, questioned and analyzed. As one way out of these debates about the state of national identity today, this dissertation explored whether national identity was ever stable and fixed in the past and how contemporary times present different discursive strategies in relation to the nation.; Socially constructed differences of ethnicity and race among others, have become important categories for constituting who belongs and who does not. Imagined communities are constructed and represented through shifting, contested and intersecting hierarchies of national, racial and ethnic identities. In particular, controversies in different U.S. communities about language, a practice that symbolizes national and ethnic identities, highlights the changing nature of identities and social relations of power.; Local newspapers are an important site for the negotiation of national and ethnic identities in different communities. To explore the interrelationships between newspapers, language controversies and the construction of national/ethnic identities, I conducted a genealogical discourse analysis. This analysis traced varying newspaper discourses about language controversies to see how national and ethnic identities emerged in varying discursive ways in particular places and times. I analyzed newspaper texts about language controversies involving the speaking of German in Iowa during World War I and the speaking of Spanish in Miami in the latter part of the 20th century.; This dissertation concludes that local newspapers are institutions that incite discourses about national/ethnic identities in their incessant attempt to achieve the ever-elusive, yet powerfully asserted idea of the unified imagined community. The newspaper is one site that produces and constitutes social divisions in terms of ethnicities and languages, disciplining the social body and producing Americans, foreigners and ethnicities as mutually constitutive from one moment to the next through shifting relations of power.