Abstract
This paper is concerned with two fundamental phenomena in any society: discourse and power. It focuses on how power is being reproduced by discourse in society. Many forms of social inequality, such as those based on gender, class, sexuality and race, are construed, perpetuated and legitimated by discourse. The critical method in this study is influenced by Michel Foucault’s theories on power and discourse. It is in discourse, as Foucault puts it, that power and knowledge are joined together. However, Foucault argues that discourse is both the means of oppressing and the means of resistance. This study examines these forms of the discursive reproduction of power in Nadine Gordimer’s novel, Occasion for Loving (1963). The researchers aim to explore how the control and power shaping and defining discourse in the prison-society of apartheid South Africa reveals the inevitable entanglement of the personal and the political and how such a relationship can be used by the artist to resist and subvert the controlling social and political discourses. The paper also sheds light on how Gordimer generates a discourse that challenges the apartheid’s legal discourse on race and interracial sexuality. Keywords: Foucault; discourse; power; resistance; Gordimer
Highlights
This paper is concerned with two fundamental phenomena in any society: discourse and power
This study examines the discursive reproduction of power in the racially- and culturally-divided society of apartheid South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s (1923-2014) third novel, Occasion for Loving (1963)
The present paper explores the discourses of race and interracial sexuality and the institution of white family and its collusion with apartheid in Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving in the light of Foucault’s theories
Summary
This paper is concerned with two fundamental phenomena in any society: discourse and power. It focuses on how power is being reproduced by discourse in society. This study examines the discursive reproduction of power in the racially- and culturally-divided society of apartheid South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s (1923-2014) third novel, Occasion for Loving (1963). As Fowler and his team showed in Language and Control (Fowler et al 1979), the crucial theoretical notion of power and domination is ‘control.’ Applying this to discourse means that we must ask who has access to the fundamental power resource of discourse in any society. The present paper explores the discourses of race and interracial sexuality and the institution of white family and its collusion with apartheid in Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving in the light of Foucault’s theories. The paper explores how Gordimer’s fiction per se serves as a discourse resisting and opposing the institution of apartheid
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