Counter-Discourse on Black Identity

Abstract

Social identities are both constructed and molded by public discourse. Muhammad Ali's speeches and interviews illustrate the power of multimodal discourse to resist and challenge the impositions of racial identity and to form a new black identity based on dignity, history, religion, and community. Ali's legacy has been studied but no research has explored his discourses as modes of identity reconstruction by means of ‘coordinated’ verbal and embodied ‘semiotic resources'. This study uses Van Leeuwen's (1996, 2008) social actor representation framework and Solorzano and Yosso's (2002) counter-storytelling methodology to analyze 20 speeches and interviews from the 1960's to the early 2000's. The findings show the nature of Ali's resistance to racism and how he is simultaneously working on the reconstruction of Black identity using counter-discourse, rejection, retrieval and affirmation, which also contributes to scholarship on counter-discourse, Black identity and multimodal communication.