SOUTH ASIAN AND (UNDOCUMENTED) LATINO/A IMMIGRANT BLOGGERS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THEIR ENGAGEMENT WITH IMMIGRATION DISCOURSES
type: CreativeWork
description: The overarching purpose of this project is to theorize how marginalized communities engage with dominant discourses and to locate possibilities for agency in contesting dominant representations of marginalized groups. I selected two discursive events as instances of a larger U.S. immigration discourse--the enactment of SB 1070 in Arizona and the publication of a column in TIME Magazine in which the author decries the influx of South Asians to his hometown of Edison, NJ. I then modified critical discourse analysis to examine weblog responses to these events by two diasporic communities interpellated by them--(undocumented) Latino/a immigrants and South Asian immigrants. Drawing upon a theory of constitutive rhetoric, I look at ways that members of these two groups are interpellated as subjects within their blogging communities. Moreover, I examine how the collective subject negotiates various identifications through a three-part diasporic identity framework consisting of structural, trans-spatial/historical, and intergroup representational positionings. I also consider the implications of the constitutive rhetoric for agency by interrogating how the blogs enable and constrain bloggers' abilities to speak about the discursive events. In addition, I interrogate bloggers' constructions of U.S. immigration discourse, identifying four ideological claims both (re)produced and challenged by the bloggers: triumphal multiculturalism; American Dream mythology; the entitlement to rights; and normative standards of acceptability. I also use a postcolonial approach to discursive engagement that considers the production of alternate subjectivities through destabilizing of the subject/object relationship. This project complicates our understanding of diasporic subjects as based on complex postcolonial subjectivities. This allows for an expanded notion of how collective subjects are constituted ontologically through the coming together of numerous points of identifications within a …
abstract: The overarching purpose of this project is to theorize how marginalized communities engage with dominant discourses and to locate possibilities for agency in contesting dominant representations of marginalized groups. I selected two discursive events as instances of a larger U.S. immigration discourse--the enactment of SB 1070 in Arizona and the publication of a column in TIME Magazine in which the author decries the influx of South Asians to his hometown of Edison, NJ. I then modified critical discourse analysis to examine weblog responses to these events by two diasporic communities interpellated by them--(undocumented) Latino/a immigrants and South Asian immigrants. Drawing upon a theory of constitutive rhetoric, I look at ways that members of these two groups are interpellated as subjects within their blogging communities. Moreover, I examine how the collective subject negotiates various identifications through a three-part diasporic identity framework consisting of structural, trans-spatial/historical, and intergroup representational positionings. I also consider the implications of the constitutive rhetoric for agency by interrogating how the blogs enable and constrain bloggers' abilities to speak about the discursive events. In addition, I interrogate bloggers' constructions of U.S. immigration discourse, identifying four ideological claims both (re)produced and challenged by the bloggers: triumphal multiculturalism; American Dream mythology; the entitlement to rights; and normative standards of acceptability. I also use a postcolonial approach to discursive engagement that considers the production of alternate subjectivities through destabilizing of the subject/object relationship. This project complicates our understanding of diasporic subjects as based on complex postcolonial subjectivities. This allows for an expanded notion of how collective subjects are constituted ontologically through the coming together of numerous points of identifications within a …
author: Mudambi, Anjana
language: English
keywords: discourse, immigration, constitutive rhetoric, agency, undocumented immigrants, South Asian
date published: 2012-07-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:25:53Z
provider: University of New Mexico
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of New Mexico

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1928/21062