Impact of Critical National Identity Discourse on Youth in Pakistan: A Proximization Analysis of Pakistani English Newspapers

The study aims to find out the spatial, temporal and evaluative proximization strategies used by the opinion writers to project Pakistan’s National Identity in the two leading English newspapers of Pakistan: DAWN and The News. The goal set for the study is to find out the impact of critical representation of Pakistan’s National Identity Discourse on Pakistani youth. The study focuses on the issue of Pakistan’s National Identity projection during the ongoing war on terror in Pakistan from 2007-2017. Purposive sampling method is used to collect the data. The epistemological framework of the study is based on Anderson’s (1991) Imagined Communities. The empirical foundation is based on Hart’s (2014) Critical Cognitive Discourse Analysis. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed by using Corpus Linguistics as a quantitative tool and proximization analysis as interpretative tool in the present study. To generate the frequencies and concordance lines of lexical items, Antconc is used. The results show that opinion writers used the spatial and temporal deixis to create the negative image of Pakistan during the last decade by linking events of past from collective memories with present. They used temporal and spatial proximization strategies to build the Critical National Identity Discourse of Pakistan by presenting it as a negative imagined community. Pakistani youth is shown as marganalisedcommunity. The evaluative proximization strategy shows that the discourse leaves a negative impact on Pakistani youth.