Exploring Multiple Identities in Barack Obama’s Speeches to the African and Arab Audience

Abstract

Presidential speeches aside, being a type of political discourse is a viable expression of the different types of identities purposively constructed and negotiated to achieve intended communicative outcomes. Using two Barack Obama's speeches to the Arab and African communities, the study seeks to investigate how political actors construct their identities to a wider audience. Using an eclectic theoretical dimension of Stance Taking, Audience Design Theory and drawing insights from Discourse Pragmatics, the study notes that the discursive features of intertextuality, metaphor, rhetorical questions, pronouns, if conditionals, multiple audience, epistemic stance are deliberately deployed to reveal their individual, social, national, and racial identities of political actors to achieve both self and communal positionings. The study concludes that identity is consciously deployed in every form of language used to show both alignment and distinctiveness.