A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE RIVER BETWEEN BY NGUGI WA THIANG’O: STUDY OF GENDER OTHERING

Abstract

The present research is a Critical Discourse Analysis of single postcolonial text The River Between by Ngugi (1965). It focuses to explore the discursive techniques employed in the selected text to propagate the concept of gendered Othering. Aim of the researcher is to find how the colonizers other the Kenyans by presenting their stereotypical representations in their discourse and how Ngugi unmasks the Whiteman’s self constructed ideologies about them. The researcher employs Van Dijk’s (2004) analytical model to decode the text critically at words, phrases, sentences and discourse levels. The analytical devices adopted for the present research from this model are:' Actor description', 'categorization', ‘lexicalization', 'authority', ‘polarization' and ‘metaphor'. Further linguistic devices included in the model are: ‘repetition’ and ‘Absolute Term’. All these discursive techniques have been employed to decode the randomly selected data from the given text. The findings show that the theme of gendered othering is very dominant in the selected text and all the mentioned analytical devices have been frequently employed in the selected text to propagate the ideological representations of culture, gender and race.