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AILA Review: Online-First ArticlesRewriting American uniqueness
Framing the issue of American exceptionalism in Barack Obama’s political rhetoric
Barack Obama is widely held to be the first sitting president to explicitly articulate the rhetoric of American
exceptionalism. This paper uses the framing analysis methodology to explore his reconstruction of the exceptional American
identity in a set of his public speeches and statements. It analyses the framing devices, such as lexical choices, metaphors and
catchphrases, as well as the reasoning devices he used to reproduce new representations of American exceptionalism. Results point
that Barack Obama’s ideational construct of American uniqueness resists the taken-for-granted narrative of America as a nation
better than the rest of the world. His framing of the exceptional American identity is rather deeply rooted in John Winthrop’s
image of the conditional shining of the city upon a hill. It conveys meanings of responsibility, hard work and commitment to
common good as conditions for the fulfilment of an exceptionally “leading American self”. This paper contributes to both
literatures on the discursive performance of the idea of American exceptionalism in the discourse of Barack Obama and the ongoing
process of defining and redefining such a highly contested value in the American political discourse.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Framing analysis and American exceptionalism
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Results
- 5.Analysis
- The aspirational greatness frame
- The conditional exceptionalism frame
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
-
References
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