DISCOURSES AND IDEOLOGIES OF WHITES: THE POSTCOLONIAL STUDY OF THE GRASS IS SINGING

Abstract

The Grass is singing stage a haunting of white colonial identity and society. It explores the complacency and shallowness of white colonial society in southern Africa. White colonial society is described as petty, racist and misogynistic, with strong hierarchal structure. This structure is perpetuated intellectually through discourse and ideology, physically through violence and social coercion. The novel deals with colonial psychosis, nervous breakdown, controversial sexual relations, at least in colonial context, and violence, all of which are physical consequences of colonialism. The novel not merely shows the oppression of Black by White colonial rulers, it also explores the concealed ways of dominance of ideology and discourse on the white colonizers. the novel abounds in the plural form of ideology that dominate the thinking of the characters who imagine that their subjectivity or identity self-generated without any imposition but in reality they are always subjects of the system that determine their identity. This paper attempts to explore the dominant ideology and colonial discourse of white society, so the reading is based on Michel Foucault notion of discourse and Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses