| dc.description.abstract | In recent decades, significant bodies of research have emerged with regard to understanding (a) Indigenous identities as "glocal" expressions (e.g., Minde 2008; Niezen 2003; Bigenho 2007), (b) Christian Zionism (e.g., Ariel 1991; Spector 2009), and (c) how ideology and power relate to language, society, and cognition (e.g., Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Lakoff 1987; Reisigl and Wodak 2001). Yet, research in each area in relation to the others has remained somewhat independent, and the intersection of these themes remains to be fully explored. This work contributes to previous scholarship in these areas by addressing points of contact among these themes with respect to how producers of certain Christian Zionist discourses represent and remember Israel and Palestine. In this thesis I explore the historical, socio-political, and cognitive dynamics of Christian Zionist dispensationalism from a critical discourse analytic perspective. I consider the relationship between dispensational discourses and complex, competing articulations of Indigenous identity by Palestinians and Israelis. I base my analysis on a corpus of 246 dispensational texts that represent various institutions, genres and modalities, and span nearly eight decades (1934-2011). Within the broad field of critical discourse analysis, I utilize methods from the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) and the socio-cognitive approach (Van Dijk 2008b, 2009a) to consider the relationship between rhetorical strategies in dispensational discourses and discursive manipulation through the formation of biased mental models (Van Dijk 2006). By analyzing various texts from these theological - and ideological - paradigms, which themselves realize dispensational discourses, I consider how dispensationalisms discursively represent and remember (or forget) Israel/Israelis and Palestine/Palestinians. With this in mind, I also draw from cultural memory studies, and consider dispensational discourses to be metaphorical "lieux de mémoire" (`sites of memory'; Nora 1989) where commemoration of Israel takes place for nationalistic, ideological, and socio-political purposes. I argue that dispensational discourses reproduce biased mental models of Palestine and Israel through a cultural narrative of commemorating Israel. My analysis suggests that representation and remembering in dispensational discourses relates to a complex framework of othering, which underlies a function of co-articulating Indigenous identity. | |
