What do these terms from the discipline of cultural studies mean? Do they have any relevance to the study of language and identity? If these are questions you have found yourself pondering, then Cultural studies and discourse analysis (CSDA) is a book you should read. This work is a productive collaboration between a cultural studies scholar (Barker) and a critical discourse analyst (Galasinski) who hope to “forge a useful interdisciplinary dialogue” (1). Although their book is written with the specific aim of showing cultural studies (CS) scholars how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used as an analytical tool in investigating identities, for sociolinguists it is also a good introduction to the way identity is theorized in CS. The identities analyzed in the data-based chapters are masculinity (chap. 4), ethnicity and nationality (chap. 5), and masculinity together with ethnicity (chap. 6).

Language is central to cultural studies as well as to linguistics, but for Barker and Galasinski it is not just a matter of pointing to the desirability of combining the two approaches in the study of identity. Rather, their main point is that “the CS project” is enriched through using CDA as a methodology. As they say on p. 1: “Though cultural studies has convincingly argued the philosophic case for the significance of language, it is rarely able to show how, in a small-scale technical sense, the discursive construction of cultural forms is actually achieved.” CSDA is a very welcome book because it does just that: In analyzing identities within a CS framework, it uses CDA methodology. Thus “CDA augments CS by showing us the technical linguistic building bricks of social construction” (3).

After the introductory chapter, chap. 2 outlines CS, and chap. 3 outlines discourse analysis (DA) and CDA. Many readers of this journal will find chap. 2 quite helpful. In this chapter, titled “Language, identity and cultural politics,” we learn that “identity has been the primary domain with which CS has been concerned during the 1990s” (28). The authors argue that “the plasticity of identity, manifested as the ability to talk about ourselves in a variety of ways, leads to a form of cultural politics centered on the re-description of persons and social situations” (28). It is this ability to talk about ourselves in various ways (this discursive practice) that forms the basis of CS investigations of identity. While some recent sociolinguistic work on identity also takes a similar approach, the CS approach foregrounds questions of power. Thus we can see why CSDA argues for the use of CDA in CS studies of identity.

Chap. 3, “Tools for discourse analysis,” begins with a good summary of the eight principles of DA generally that the authors believe to be the most important (63–64), and then the three assumptions that they see as central to CDA (64):

• “Analysis should avoid easy, dichotomous explanations of the phenomena studied.”
• The aim is “to uncover contradictions or dilemmas underpinning social life.”
• “Analysis is self-reflective.”

Among the various traditions within CDA, the authors focus on the approach associated with Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics. This approach analyzes texts according to three functions of language: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. But as their data are “largely non-interactive” interview data, the authors are most interested in the ideational aspects of text. A highlight of this chapter is the 12-page analysis of the credo of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Written with a subtle touch of cynicism, it illustrates such aspects of CDA as “the importance of passivization and nominalization in setting up the structure of action and agency in the text” (73). This analysis nicely exemplifies CSDA's point that no matter how “contentious or ideologically motivated” DA may be (85), interpretation “follows on from an empirically verifiable analysis of the text” (85).

The second half of the book comprises the authors' analysis of spoken (interview) data. With their main research interest being in the identities of their interviewees, they aim to redress the imbalance that they find in the “general failure [of CS] to analyze the utterances of living speaking subjects” (21), and even its failure to “base analysis on some sort of ‘hard’ evidence” (24). The authors see that CDA can fill this gap as a tool for linguistic analysis of actual utterances that shares with CS “a specific concern with subordinated groups” (25).

Chap. 4 analyzes the “performance of masculinity as achieved through men's talk about their fathers” (86). The theoretical starting point for this analysis is the social constructionist position that is central to CS, that “sexed and gendered identities are … largely a matter of how femininity and masculinity are spoken about, rather than manifestations of universal biological essences” (87). The data for this chapter come from two case studies drawn from a larger project in which interviews were carried out in a city near Sydney with 30- to 70-year-old academic and general university staff, as well as 16- to 25-year-old homeless and “at risk” men at a drop-in center. However, we are given no further contextualization for these interviews, such as number of participants or length of interviews, and it is not even clear if the interviewer was the researcher, or someone else.

Some readers of this journal may be disappointed in this chapter because it is not primarily focused on analysis of discourse. It is more aptly described as “discourse-sensitive ethnographic research into the cultural construction of masculinity” (86). Thus, there is more attention to the content of the interview data than to its linguistic form. Nevertheless, there is a very interesting section that analyzes the ideational level of one interviewee's language; this man describes his father not in terms of action or agency, but through his own mental processes (e.g., he thinks his father appreciates him, he thought his father was amazing). Other features of language use that are part of the analysis in this chapter are hedges, mitigators, and pronoun shifts. The discussion highlights tensions and inconsistencies in the interviewees' identity construction, in which control and distance are central metaphors of contemporary masculinity.

It is chap. 5 that will be of greatest interest to most sociolinguists concerned with analysis of identity, because of its clear presentation of the concept of ethnicity from a cultural studies perspective, as well as the convincing way in which CDA analysis is used. Barker and Galasinski point out that their conceptualization of ethnicity differs from the traditional one (such as is found in much sociolinguistic writing on language and ethnic identity), which “has stressed the sharing of norms, values, beliefs, cultural symbols and practices” (122). Arguing against the essentialism inherent in such definitions, they see ethnicity as a “relational” concept, and “a process of boundary formation constructed and maintained under specific socio-historical conditions” (citing Barth 1969). A further important part of the CS approach is the understanding that “ethnicity is constructed through power relations between groups” (123).

The analysis in this chapter is drawn from seven interviews with elderly villagers living in southeastern Poland near the Ukrainian border. The interviewees were told that the purpose of the interviews was to learn something about “how life was spent in their youth,” and the interviewer thought that they would talk about pre-World War II times. However, mostly they told stories of 1945–46, when Ukrainian separatist troops carried out three major attacks on the district, in which the inhabitants suffered “the most appalling atrocities” (128).

The analysis of the way that these interviewees talk about their experiences during this time shows the relational, context-bound nature of their ethnic identity, focusing on pronominal usage and impersonal verb forms, which construct Poles in opposition to Ukrainians. Further, in their narratives about the conflict between Polish and Ukrainian residents of their district, the Polish interviewees construct the Ukrainians as agents in a material process. The Poles, on the other hand, are talked about not in terms of actions but in terms of the mental processes they “took up” in reaction. Thus, the grammatical choices construct the Poles as “passive participants who merely suffered at the hands of their opponents” (148). The analysis is exemplified in 18 interview extracts.

The final chapter, also based on analysis of interview data, starts with a discussion of multiple identities and the notion of hybridity, which “has proved useful in highlighting cultural mixing and the emergence of new forms of identity” (158). However, I have some problems with a major theme of this chapter: that (Australian) Aboriginality is coded as male for the two interviewees. An important part of the evidence for this interpretation comes from the two men's use of the term written in the book as black fellows, as in an extract that begins “‘Everyone just brings the black fellows down, ‘cause I'm Aboriginal’.” But did the interviewee really say black fellow rather than black fella? In my nearly 30 years of talking with Aboriginal people in New South Wales (where these interviews took place) and Queensland, I have observed widespread use of the term blackfellas, but never blackfellows. While the transcription used in the book is primarily standard orthography, there is some representation of salient conversational contractions, like ‘cause (rather than because) in the same sentence. Although the lexical item fella undoubtedly is cognate with the general English term fellow (which usually has male reference), it is used by Aboriginal English speakers all over the country as a gender-neutral term, and is generally written as fella or fulla. Further, this form is productive in compounds and is widely used in such other expressions as whitefellas, us fellas, you fellas, them fellas.

Apart from this doubt over part of the analysis in chap. 6, I find this book to be convincing and well worth reading. I am not in a position to assess the overview of CS, but to the extent that I can assess the CDA overview, I believe it should prove helpful. The book is clearly written, with helpful layout and headings, although I still find chap. 2 somewhat hard going.

Finally, as for understanding terms such as bricolage, and ideology (as well as others listed at the beginning of this review), and understanding how they relate to the study of language and identity: You'll have to read CSDA.