‘We’re not ethnic, we’re Irish!’: Oral histories and the discursive construction of immigrant identity

Abstract

This article examines how national and immigrant identities are discursively constructed through the use of oral histories, using a corpus of 15 oral-history interviews (25 hours of transcribed talk) collected from members of the Irish Association of Manitoba. Using a simplified discourse-historical approach, the analysis focuses on content, constructive strategies of assimilation and dissimilation, and the linguistic means by which those strategies are achieved, using Wodak et al.’s (1999) framework from an in-depth study of Austrian discourse and identity. While analysis of participants’ discourse about identity echoed much of the current theoretical knowledge available about identity — that it is a discursive construction revealed in narratives, that it is provisional and negotiated with others — the analysis also showed that for specific subgroups such as immigrants, identity construction is context-dependent, particularly for diasporic groups.