Review of Eleonora Esposito. 2021. Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A Сritical Analysis of Political Discourse in the Caribbean. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins

In the 2010 General Election of Trinidad and Tobago, Persad-Bissessar successfully became the first East Indian female prime minister of the country.As two of the most influential strategies, discursive construction and multimodal resources in the election campaign come into researchers' eyes.In Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A Critical Analysis of Political Discourse in the Caribbean, Esposito critically examines how Persad-Bissessar adopts linguistic and visual strategies to construe the image and identity of a new leader, a new party and a new nation, resorting to critical discourse studies (CDS), discourse-historical approach (DHA), and multimodal approach.Methodologically, she combines social and historical aspects, linguistic aspects and multimodal aspects, to conduct a critical multimodal political discourse analysis.Aside from these, considering the research objectives, she sheds some light on the studies of the Caribbean, featuring as a postcolonial and multi-ethnic nation.The book comprises seven chapters, beginning with an introduction.After briefly stating Persad-Bissessar's political success, Chapter 1 points out that there is a gap in the systematic critical studies of how discourses shape complex Caribbean postcolonial society.Therefore, Esposito discusses possibilities, necessities, and also challenges in combining CDS with postcolonial studies.Five key notions: discourse, critique, ideology, agency and power are reviewed in light of both CDS and postcolonial critique.Finally, the structure of the book is given, followed by a short explanation of terminologies.