Our skin is trouble: Racial discourse in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’

Theresah Addai-Mununkum,Rexford Boateng Gyasi

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.9n.2p.24

Theresah Addai-Mununkum, Rexford Boateng Gyasi

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijclts.v.9n.2p.24

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Abstract

The recent incident in Minneapolis, United States, where George Floyd, an African-American man, was manhandled by a police officer has brought about the resurgence of racial awareness as championed by the Black Lives Matter Movement. The concept of race has shaped the lives of so many generations and continues to do so in the 21st century. Racial segregation as well as the public hysteria on racism has had so much influence on societies and has led to discrimination and racial slurs across races. Using Critical Race Theory, this study examines racial discourse in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’. The analysis of the discourse reveals racial tendencies in the description of the black race through white-black (Self/Other) binary (racial segregation), race-based discrimination and animal metaphors. The paper contributes to scholarship on racial discourses and foregrounds the function of language in depicting the racial orientation of characters in literary texts.

Highlights

In his influential paper on Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jacobson (1960) explicates an emotive/expressive function of language and posits that through the use of language, people evoke certain attitudes towards a particular subject, concept or phenomenon
Since the black or the ‘other’ is the group often considered in the elaboration of race theories (Lopez, 1994), the current study investigates the depiction of racism from the perspective of two African texts- Sizwe Bansi is Dead and ‘Telephone Conversation’, in a comparative study with a British novel-Heart of Darkness
The analysis reveals instances of racial discrimination in the three texts and these are discussed under three thematic variables: white-black (Self/Other) binary, race-based discrimination and animal metaphors

Summary

Introduction

In his influential paper on Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jacobson (1960) explicates an emotive/expressive function of language and posits that through the use of language, people evoke certain attitudes towards a particular subject, concept or phenomenon. A discourse is said to be racial if it depicts racism, and this conforms to the claim that “language is an important factor in the development of the construct of race” 256) as a “collective text and talk of society with respect to issues of race”. Racial discourse is conceptualised by Doane He conceptualises it as a means through which individuals, social actors (and writers) develop racial issues as they strive for ideological advantage. This paper examines racial discourse in three texts: a play set in South Africa (Sizwe Bansi is Dead), a British novel (Heart of Darkness), and a poem ‘Telephone Conversation’ by a Nigerian. The objective of the study is to investigate racial habits and reveal how they are represented through the discourse of the selected texts

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