RESISTING DOMINANT CULTURE IN THE LONELY LONDONER: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Abstract
This paper investigates the resistance of immigrants to cultural dominance of London society in The Lonely Londoners a postcolonial novel by Sam Selvon. The Lonely Londoners (1956) depicts the miserable life of Caribbean people who migrated in hope to find better conditions of living than their countries. The paper furnishes a theoretic ground for analyzing the discourse of the novel related to the way the novel presented an important subject which is resisting dominant culture throughout events and language that is used by the novelist. The paradigm of immigrants and their trauma and shock have always been the spot line of discussion after WWII. Through the colonial history there was a dominant discourse of Western cultural superiority imposed on colonized, with the postcolonial era a different discourse emerged through intellectual presentations such as Fanon, Said, Bhabha ideas and others who enlightened literary theory and criticism and theorized resistance and cultural identity. Thus, this paper will analyze critically the discourse of resistance of Postcolonial people in exile to ascertain their existence and identity.
Keywords
References
- Adams, E. C. (2017). Passive resistance: Hopi responses to Spanish contact and conquest. In European Intruders and Changes in Behaviour and Customs in Africa, America and Asia before 1800 (pp. 41-55). Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Christian-Smith, L. K. (2017). The politics of the textbook. The politics of the textbook (pp. 1-21). Routledge. Bonds, A., & Inwood, J. (2016). Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Progress in Human Geography, 40(6), 715-733. Crane, D., Kawashima, N., & Kawasaki, K. I. (2016). Culture and globalization theoretical models and emerging trends. In Global culture (pp. 11-36). Routledge. Dutta, M. J. (2015). Decolonizing communication for social change: A culture-centered approach. Communication Theory, 25(2), 123-143. Ellis, A. E. (2015). The imperfect longing: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the dance of doubt. African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 8(2), 178-189. Escobar, A. (2018). Culture, economics, and politics in Latin American social movements theory and research. In The making of social movements in Latin America (pp. 62-86). Routledge. Johansson, A., & Vinthagen, S. (2016). Dimensions of everyday resistance: An analytical framework. Critical Sociology, 42(3), 417-435. Kapur, R. (2017). Postcolonial erotic disruptions: Legal narratives of culture, sex, and nation in India. In Popular Culture and Law (pp. 61-112). Routledge. Liu, T. (2016). Hybridization in Political Civilization in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 6(5), 1006-1010. Marshall, E. Z. (2016). ‘Is Who Send We Up In This Place?’Threshold Paralysis and Postponed Arrivals in Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners and George Lamming’s The Emigrants. Literary London Journal, 13(1). Mills, C. W. (2017). White supremacy. In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race (pp. 475-487). Routledge. Moss, P. (2017). Power and resistance in early childhood education: From dominant discourse to democratic experimentalism. Journal of Pedagogy, 8(1), 11-32. Ungar, M. (2015). Resilience and culture: The diversity of protective processes and positive adaptation. In Youth resilience and culture (pp. 37-48). Springer, Dordrecht. Wolfe, S. F. (2016). A Happy English Colonial Family in 1950s London?: Immigration, Containment and Transgression in The Lonely Londoners. Culture, Theory and Critique, 57(1), 121-136.
Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
-
Journal Section
Research Article
Publication Date
January 14, 2020
Submission Date
July 13, 2019
Acceptance Date
December 10, 2019
Published in Issue
Year 1970 Volume: 5 Number: 15