Diaspora and Transnational Identities: Table talk construction of Syrian-American identities in times of civil war

Abstract

This research addresses the chaotic violence plaguing Syria, which has culminated from past violence and oppression, and the war's affect on the transnational identities of married first-generation Syrian-Americans living in America. As Bradatan et al. note, transnational identity is fitting for the postmodern idea of fluid identity that attempts to avoid the assumption that belonging to one group implies exclusion from other groups; as a result, the transnational individual embodies the split between state-imposed identity and personal identity, which is caused by political upheavals and propagates migration. By interviewing first-generation Syrian-American spouses, insight on the liminality between Western media coverage and Syrian legendry has been revealed through the participants' dynamic, multimodal acculturation of the English and Western media with the Arabic and Syrian legendry. The objective was that the participants frame the discourse with their respective spouses so that acculturation and code-switching came about naturally within their kitchen table conversation. This approach was intended to give support to the Syrians affected, by giving them the authority to frame and develop the discourse with one another within their homes. I followed a discourse-historical approach in analyzing the data provided by the participants, and this data shaped the historical background and further analyses.