This dissertation concerns a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the Garifuna national identity. The Garifuna people of the Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize are an Afro-Amerindian people who practice spirit possession and speak an Arawakan language. They have lived in Central America since their expulsion from the island of St. Vincent by the hands of the British at the end of the 18th century. The fieldwork for this dissertation was undertaken in Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and New Orleans over the course of several years. Analysis was focused on the discursive construction of national identity in speech, foodways, the production and consumption of music, and visual art. Nations are ubiquitous in the modern world. Unlike corporate groups based on lineage, nations, described by Benedict Anderson as “imagined communities”, are constructed by and through what Ernesto Laulau and Chantel Mouffe label discursive “articulations”. In such articulations, nations are often defined by culture and language. This dissertation demonstrates that contemporary national identities are best studied using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) which can follow, track, and analyze discourses manifested in speech and visual art, as well as the production and consumption of music. This dissertation adopts this approach and seeks to reveal the most important nodal points, defined as privileged discursive points of partial fixation, commonly found in speech, music, and art. Using this approach, I discovered several nodal points that I tracked and analyzed across several modes including speech, visual art, foodways, and music. For example, Garifuna people anchor their national identity discursively to an ethnogenesis linked both to Africa and St. Vincent. Moreover, articulations surrounding ethnogenesis are linked to discourses about race and diaspora. Other important nodal points included the Garifuna language, music, and food. All of these nodal points are often collocated in song, art, and even ritual. Through deliberate or coincidental manipulation of these nodal points in multiple modes, Garifuna people have the power to contextualize their national identity as resilient, black, Pan-Caribbean, and cosmopolitan even as they face the dissolution of ancestral communities resulting from rising seas, changing economies, urbanization, and migration.
