The 'We Will Rise' 2010 Election Campaign: the Discursive Construction of Political and National Identities in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

From its colonial history, twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago inherited a uniquely diverse population of 1.3 million, including descendants of East Indians, Africans, Chinese, Syrians and Lebanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and British, among others. The legacy of British divide et impera, paired with perceived ethnic diversity, has been marking and re-producing a deep Us vs. Them division, especially between two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%). For over forty years, two ethnic groups have been struggling for political control through census counts and voting along ethnic lines. Although elections in country have always served as the critical arbiter in adjudicating rival claims by main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege (Premdas 2004: 19), 2010 General Election seemed to have marked a turning point in history of nation. On May 24th, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female Prime Minister and only second person of East Indian origin to hold PM office in 48 years of independence. Breaking out of country's rigid bipolar political mould, Persad-Bissessar won as leader of People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. She defeated Patrick Manning's People's National Movement and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of 41 in House of Representatives. Taking this unprecedented political success as its starting point, this dissertation explores discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar's election, analyzing a large corpus of textual and visual data from People's Partnership campaign. The starting assumption is that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered coalition party but also by discursively positing a new, inclusive identity space throughout campaign and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in country. Therefore, I set to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, defining her role as first woman PM candidate in history of country, legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalisms, as well as fostering a wider national sense of belonging. As political communication has increasingly grown beyond realm of verbal language, understanding Persad-Bissessar's political meaning-making required both analysis of her election speeches as well as study of a number of multimodal texts, such as video and printed ads as well as official portraits, which played a crucial role in political advertising of her coalition. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I will combine 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (Wodak and Meyer 2009) for analysis of Persad-Bissessar's textual data and Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) 'Visual Grammar' for analysis of visual data. Although English-speaking Caribbean is home to largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries around globe, political discourse from archipelago is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. The analysis of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago has potential to shed light on complexities, struggles and contradictions of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago by integrating knowledge about historical sources and social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. Starting from analysis of political discourse, this work aims at offering a new, discursive perspective on ethnicity, identity and power in Trinidad and Tobago as well as increasing scholarly awareness for development of a critical interpretative stance for political texts and talks beyond Euro-American zone.