The discursive articulation of Canadian identity through Don Cherry’s Coach’s Corner
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Have you ever thought about how you would define your identity? How about delineating your nation’s identity? Attempts at providing a fully-fledged definition of Canadian identity have been going on for several decades. Still, the debates about a unified description of Canadianness remain unresolved. Nowadays, the media provide one of the platforms offering an interesting insight into the process of identity negotiation and present an important means of facilitating identity construction. The present study inspects the discursive construction of national identity within Canadian context. Specifically, the study focuses on Coach’s Corner, currently the longest running television program in Canada, and its main personality – Don Cherry. The data for the analysis has been collected throughout the National Hockey League 2015/2016 regular season when Coach’s Corner airs weekly on Saturday night. Relying predominantly on Critical Discourse Analysis and its sub-disciplines, the study explores discursive strategies and linguistic devices employed in order to articulate Canadian national uniqueness on the one hand, and how to position Canadian collectivity towards other nations on the other hand. Also, the study explores the presentation of the in-group members and the out-group members on the show and how the discourse is appropriated in order to create an inclusive framework for the members of the former. By subjecting the collected data to qualitative research, the present study aims to demonstrate that there exists conceptual polarization between the inner and outer group members that is created by adopting contrasting discourses by Don Cherry. Furthermore, the study argues that Cherry negotiates Canadian identity by foregrounding the positive qualities of the in-group and the negative qualities of the out-group. |
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