Discourse is the system of language, ideas, and rules that a society uses to define what is true, normal, and possible. It shapes both how we think and how power operates. Discourse is a system of knowledge-production that shapes what can be said, thought, and known about a subject
Example: "Scientific racism" wasn't just prejudice—it was a discourse that organized research questions, institutional practices, and policy decisions around the assumption of racial hierarchy
Discourses don't just describe reality—they create what counts as true, scientific, or common sense. They determine:
Not just an idea—a knowledge system that made expansion feel inevitable
Gast's American Progress (1872) doesn't just show Manifest Destiny—it constructs it as visual truth
Survey photography claimed objectivity while carefully constructing the West
A discursive artifact is a material object—a painting, photograph, map, or document—that embodies and reproduces a discourse's core assumptions.
These artifacts don't just reflect ideology; they actively produce and circulate it. They make the discourse visible, tangible, and emotionally resonant.
Every image of the West was teaching Americans how to see, what to value, and who had the right to possess.
The myth of the vanishing Indian is a false, but influential story that claimed Native peoples were naturally disappearing, which helped justify U.S. expansion and hide the violence of removal, war, and assimilation.
An embedded discourse is a sub-discourse that operates within a larger discursive framework, doing specific ideological work.
The "Vanishing Indian" myth resolved a fundamental contradiction: How could a nation founded on liberty justify dispossession and destruction of Indigenous peoples?
Answer: If Indians are "vanishing" naturally—through some inevitable historical or biological process—then Americans are absolved of responsibility.