| Abstract
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My research into ethnic representations in the major newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, the Commercial Appeal, between 1990 and 2006 looks at the relationship between changing patterns of immigration, particularly in Memphis, the dominant political ideologies during this period--neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the newspaper's discourse about ethnicity and Southern identity. In order to reconstruct this relationship I analyze stories about three ethnic groups referred to by the Commercial Appeal as Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims I argue that during the 1990-2006 period, the Commercial Appeal's rhetorical tendency was to sustain the limits of the imagined national and local communities by representing the three ethnic groups as engaged in transformation from a disobedience to civic obligation. In doing so the Commercial Appeal represented national and local events and subsequent editorial and readers' reactions to them as a public representation of how local communities were accommodating and adapting to the new immigrants. Representations of ethnic groups appeared on the front pages or in the hard news section during 1990-2006 when they were examples of either disobedience or obedience. If they appeared in the soft news section, they were fulfilling their obligations. Although the Commercial Appeal does not strictly define the difference between "obedience" and "obligation," the two categories rely on the shared knowledge between journalists and readers about their meaning. Whenever disagreement arose, editorials and letters to the editor clarified how the categories should be understood. The emphasis on a particular representation in one section revealed that narratives about ethnic groups are delocalized and do not reproduce the idea of Southern identity and sense of place. I gathered the stories through the newspaper database LexisNexis using the keywords such as "immigration," "immigrants," "ethnicity," "Hispanics," "Latinos," "Asian community." and "Muslims." A weakness of LexisNexis is its omission of news photographs and cartoons that provide additional information about a particular discourse. The data from LexisNexis covers the period 1990-2003: I used paper-based copies of the Commercial Appeal for articles published between 2004 and 2006.
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