Iran has undergone a metamorphosis in its ideological and national identity due to its historical upheavals in the past century e.g. the Persian Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911), Islamic Revolution (1979), Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). This paper aims to present the diachronic changes in the Iranian official national anthems’ lyrics. It demonstrates how the socio-political changes influenced these anthems and how such transformations have shaped the ideological identities of Iranians’ pre and post Islamic revolution to outsiders via lyrics and through a critical discourse study. I also show how these identities are constructed through texts and via intertextual means. The results display that the changes in Iranian anthems not only demonstrate a socio-historical transformation, but also a kind of acceleration in terms of political developments in contemporary Iran, and the ways in which the leaders may have employed their own ideological views to project Iranian identities.

This study focuses on the British English version of Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, a series of adventure comics created from 1929 to 1976. The series became increasingly popular throughout the mid-twentieth century and remains so even to the present day. However, it is still a subject of intrigue and controversy for many scholars due to the alleged racist/ethnic stereotypes in this series in terms of the visual representations and narratives. This paper explores the construction of the most frequently occurring non-European ethnic groups in the Tintin series, the East Asians, focusing on selected character roles regarding their functions, ethnicity, and dispersion throughout different narrative plots in three volumes where they were depicted. To that end, this research integrates Vladimir Propp’s narrative analysis and Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak’s discourse historical approach to critical discourse studies, while drawing on parts of Theo van Leeuwen’s social semiotic model in the analysis of images as well as Teun A. van Dijk’s strategies of positive-Self and negative Others presentation. The findings show some idiosyncrasies in terms of East Asians’ distinctive national identities and the dynamicity between the macro-strategies of positive Self versus negative Other representations in the series while touching on the concept of “internal Others.”

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