Critical Discourse Analysis: Narratives of Gender-Based Violence Victims in Bamenda-Cameroon (Published)
Gendered roles ascribed to members of society form the basis for their acceptance or rejection in that society. Whether subtle or overt violence, the effects are far-reaching and traumatizing on the victims, be they women, men, or children. This is obvious in discourses revealed in narratives of the violated. The questions asked are; how do the violated express themselves? What are the causes and effects of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and how can it be curbed in society? Since language is a powerful instrument used in communicating feelings and thoughts especially, the language used in narratives surrounding domestic abuse forms the data for this paper. Data was collected from 29 participants between the ages of 25 and 50, using ethnographic approaches, particularly semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. The theoretical bases were Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model which dwells on Description, Interpretation, and Explanation and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics with a focus on the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. The analysis revealed that illiteracy, ignorance, dependency and poverty as some of the causes of GBV. Additionally, the analysis revealed that language patterns in transitivity are used by the victims in their struggle to maintain emotional balance and fight the existing cultural and societal stereotypes concerning how gender and sexuality affect their mental health. This paper, therefore, recommends the creation of safe spaces to enable victims of domestic violence to express their trauma and find healing in the process of narration.
Keywords: CDA, Gender, Inequality, Narratives, SFL, Violence
Ahdāf Soueif Makes a Map for Love: A Reality or a Fantasy Through the Meeting of Civilizations and Times? A Dialectic Vision in the Novel-The Map of Love by the Egyptian Novelist Ahdāf Soueif (Published)
It is impossible to talk about literature except through its genres. Besides, it is impossible to deal with any genre without starting with one of its types. When the writer decides to create a literary work, he produces it in the frame of a story, a novel or a poem within a general perception of literature, where all literary genres meet. The Arab novel has developed since the middle of the last century and it has achieved a presence that imposes itself on other genres and types, especially poetry, which kept occupying the central position in creativity. The historical novel, for example, was established in the Arab world by Jurjī Zaydān (1861-1914) at the beginning of the twentieth century, modelled on the Western historical novel and a lot of Arab novelists wrote in its form, stressing in one way or another that they were writing a historical novel. The historical novel is a type of novel in which history blends with imagination, and it intends to describe a certain period or a certain major event in a suitable narrative style that is based on history data, but without being tied or committed to it but often without adherence or commitment to them in most cases. When Ahdāf Sueif wrote The Map of Love, she introduced it in a dazzling way because it is based on the reader’s manner of reading history and the concept of history through an amazing love story that is full of beauty that makes the reader unite with the text.
Citation: Bishara H.(2022) Ahdāf Soueif Makes a Map for Love: A Reality or a Fantasy Through the Meeting of Civilizations and Times? A Dialectic Vision in the NovelThe Map of Love by the Egyptian Novelist Ahdāf Soueif, European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, Vol.10, No.9, pp.49-69
Keywords: Cultural, Violence, colonized, colonizer, external separation, internal assimilation, natural acculturation.
The Social Media, Human Dignity and Linguistic Violence in Cameroon: A Socio-Pragmatic Perception (Published)
Conflicts, violence, human rights abuses, and the influence of the social media are the most serious challenges the modern world and emerging democracies face today, and Cameroon, in which verbal and nonverbal violence, has become a daily social fact, is no exception. The language that we speak or write influences our cultural identities, and perception of our social realities. The aim of the present study is to collect and examine specimens of speech acts specific to acts of violence used by the social media practitioners as sociolinguistic facts in Cameroon, in order to analyse the different expressions that typify instances of use depicting verbal or linguistic violence in their discourse. The types of words, phrases and linguistic forms identified and analysed characteristically describe these texts as authentic lexicon specific to discourse of conflict and violence within Cameroon in the context of social tension and the Anglophone crisis. The objective being to create more public awareness on the devastating consequences of violence to unity, human dignity, insecurity, peace and living together in Cameroon. To handle complex sociolinguistic data of this sort, the mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology was used to collect online reports from content creators, trained and untrained media practitioners and to analyse these from a sociopragmatic perspective in order to describe its impact on the readers and Cameroonians in situ. The qualitative discourse analysis used was based on a combination of different theoretical frameworks including the Critical Discourse Analysis, Speech Act Theory, Semantic theories, communicative acts, and sociopragmatics relevant to pragmatically explain some of the vocabulary, frequently occurring in the corpus and characteristic of the lexemes of violence, referred to as linguistic violence. Note that words carry and transmit powerful vibrations and emotional energy discharges capable of igniting feelings of hatred, anger, insecurity, intolerance, bitterness, and consequently gruesomely unacceptable acts of human rights abuses. Equally, after the analysis, findings reveal that the different discourse types employ different performative speech acts and stylistic devices including connotation, imagery, symbolism, synonymy, polysemy, and neologism in the forms of verbal abuses, insults, minimisation, and stigmatisation that characterise the contemporary Cameroon society, which suffers from verbal abuses and indecent language use that communicates specific hate-filled and hurtful messages characteristic of linguistic violence in Cameroon, with an urgent need to be addressed. After the analysis, several findings reveal an unprecedented increase in violence and atrocities committed by both separatists and government military on the Anglophone population in particular and on Cameroonians as a result of the Anglophone crisis in violation of human rights and dignity. While suggesting the need to seek for a genuine and an inclusive dialogue, tolerance, the use of polite and decent speech acts, for peace to return is imperative, findings equally reveal that conflict and acts of violence has greatly enriched the Cameroon English language vocabulary, compounding old words to take on new meanings and introducing new words with connotative meanings from other languages like French, local and Pidgin English languages.
Citation: Willie Mushing Tamfuh (2022) The Social Media, Human Dignity and Linguistic Violence in Cameroon: A Socio-Pragmatic Perception, European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, Vol.10, No.7, pp.24-120, 2022
Keywords: Conflict, Discourse, Human Rights, Perception, Social media, Socio-pragmatics, Violence
Ahdāf Soueif Makes a Map for Love: A Reality or a Fantasy Through the Meeting of Civilizations and Times? A Dialectic Vision in the Novel The Map of Love by the Egyptian Novelist Ahdāf Soueif (Published)
It is impossible to talk about literature except through its genres. Besides, it is impossible to deal with any genre without starting with one of its types. When the writer decides to create a literary work, he produces it in the frame of a story, a novel or a poem within a general perception of literature, where all literary genres meet. The Arab novel has developed since the middle of the last century and it has achieved a presence that imposes itself on other genres and types, especially poetry, which kept occupying the central position in creativity. The historical novel, for example, was established in the Arab world by Jurjī Zaydān (1861-1914) at the beginning of the twentieth century, modelled on the Western historical novel and a lot of Arab novelists wrote in its form, stressing in one way or another that they were writing a historical novel. The historical novel is a type of novel in which history blends with imagination, and it intends to describe a certain period or a certain major event in a suitable narrative style that is based on history data, but without being tied or committed to it but often without adherence or commitment to them in most cases. When Ahdāf Sueif wrote The Map of Love, she introduced it in a dazzling way because it is based on the reader’s manner of reading history and the concept of history through an amazing love story that is full of beauty that makes the reader unite with the text.
Citation: Hanan Bishara (2022) Ahdāf Soueif Makes a Map for Love: A Reality or a Fantasy Through the Meeting of Civilizations and Times? A Dialectic Vision in the Novel The Map of Love by the Egyptian Novelist Ahdāf Soueif, European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, Vol.10, No.4, pp.13-36
Keywords: Cultural, Violence, colonized, colonizer, external separation, internal assimilation, natural acculturation.
Symbolism and Race in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (Published)
Theatre is one of the means by which different cultures both proclaim and question themselves.It is constantly connected with the broad forces of insurrection and rituals in different societies. Starting from the beginning of the previous century theatre has developed as a practice with which to rethink gender, violence, ethnicity, identity and arts. Racial thinking and modern stage interact to reset an understanding of race and turn individual experiences into art. Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) is the study of a culture of white supremacy that has historically marginalized all other races, presenting some possible consequences. In an attempt to combat the deep rooted problem of racial discrimination in the American society, Baraka tries to examine and analyze the psyche behind it.
Keywords: Culture, Discrimination, Violence, race
Whatever Happened to the Arab Spring: Albert Cossery’s Philosophy of Revolution in The Jokers (Published)
This paper investigates Cossery’s philosophy of revolution in his novel La Violence et la Dérision (1964), translated into English as The Jokers in 2010. I examine Cossery’s philosophy in the light of Michel Foucault’s concept of power and his views on revolutions in general and the Iranian 1979 Revolution against the Pahlavi regime in particular. I argue that Foucault’s analysis of the revolutionary situation in Iran still applies to the revolution that took place in Egypt on January 25, 2011. This argument extends to Cossery’s novel. The Jokers represents a revolution that is similarly “out of history” with a similar hope for success. While the January revolution is located at the extremely serious and reverent, the revolution in Cossery’s novel wallows in ridicule and irreverence. Due to the opposite directions taken by the serious revolution in reality and the ridiculous one in the novel (the former soaring up to heaven, the latter falling down to earth), both of them are, in Foucauldian terms, located out of history, challenging the dominant power structures. Cossery manages to bring a group of Diogenean characters to the frontlines of an extraordinary revolution. These characters usually play secondary roles in works of art about resistance and revolution. In this novel, they are the leaders, the planning and the executive body of Cossery’s philosophy. In the end, the Diogeneans succeed, but their ultimate success still depends on the abandonment of traditional ways of revolution, because governments are used to these ways, and those in power know how to turn them to their advantage.
Keywords: Foucault, Revolution, Violence, diogenean, dominant, indifference.
The Rhetoric of Violence in the Poetry of Don L. Lee, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez: A Reading in Ethnic Poetry (Published)
The 1960s in America witnessed an abundance of ethnic poetry authored by young black poets. Most of that poetry was devoted to the rejection of the American culture in favor of the consolidation of an African-American personality independent of White America. This new wave of black poetry of the 1960s and ‘70s was, thus, not only a literature of protest, which gradually turned into violence exercised against white Americans, but also an outcome of a psychological state encapsulated in the internal problems of black Americans. This new black poetry was primarily employed as a catalyst aiming at awakening the ethno-political consciousness of black people. It, therefore, incorporated elements of black culture and mythos, which were meant to enhance the values of the struggle and hence the revolution to be ignited against the American value system. Utilizing the socio-political events of the period as a setting and the “black aesthetic theory,” originated in the same decade, the 1960s, as a critical framework, the present study explores the revolutionary poetry of black American poets, such as Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez. In this context, the study will argue that the black poetry of the 1960s is but an offshoot of the protest motif in Afro-American poetry first initiated by the black slave poets of the 18th century. So, consequently, the black poets, dealt with in this study, will be contended to make a breakthrough and to pursue, instead, a black literary nationalism, capable of reflecting the aspirations of the Blacks. Their poetic attempts will be argued to promulgate the “black aesthetic,” to revitalize black values and to call for revolution.
Keywords: Afro-American Poetry, Black Poetry, Catalyst, Don l. Lee, Ethno-Political Consciousness, Nikki Giovanni, Protest Motif, Radical Development, Revolutionary Poets of 1960s and 1970s, Sonia Sanchez, Violence, rhetoric, the Black Aesthetic Theory
Treatment of Violence in King Lear and Bond’s Lear (Published)
The purpose of this research paper is to examine Bond’s Lear in relation to which it “stands to Shakespeare’s great original” (Smith 194). Both plays deal with the issues of political and economic power and investigates the relation of aggression and violence present within nature of human beings when it comes to their struggle over supremacy and rule. This paper focuses tendency of ruling individuals to assert aggression and violence and research work tends to explore both plays in the light of Bond’s Preface to his version of Lear
Keywords: Bond's Lear, King Lear, Society, Violence, and political struggle, economic power
Black Militant Theatre: Purificatory Rituals or Liberatory Violence? (Published)
Amiri Baraka’s pre-nationalist and nationalist plays such as Dutchman and Experimental Death Unit # 1 largely incorporates scenes of murder and violence. The cadaverous permeates. Baraka’s stage. There is a whole sacrificial system that determines the characters’ ultimate destinies and lives. This mechanism operates not merely to bring death to those who betray the national black liberation cause, but also to castigate those holders of the slave mentality and chastise the assimilationists who hide behind a white mask. This sacrificial mechanism functions as a generator of purification to cleanse the black community from the vestiges of black docility. In the Marxist plays, violence and murder take the form of political assassination. A play such as The Motion of History displays the dynamics of political struggle that conditions the kind of murder or acts of killings. Whereas in the nationalist plays murder is effected for purificatory goals, in the Marxist plays the intersection between political struggle and the official repression of the state determines the shape of physical elimination for political motives. The neutralization of political opponents assumes that murder is simply a means of exclusion from the political arena and restoration of political and social stability. Because agitation is detrimental to social peace and political order, systemic violence takes a bloody dimension and approximates bloodshed. This paper seeks to highlight the prevalence and, in Frantz Fanon’s phrase, the instrumentality of violence as an absolute praxis in Baraka’s dramatic works. Violence marshals then a new equation of asserted subjectivity.
Keywords: Murder, Victimization, Violence, oppression., struggle