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Research Article
Weaponizing Language and Asserting Identity in the Plays of Derek Walcott and Bate Besong
Issue:
Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2025
Pages:
31-40
Received:
15 February 2025
Accepted:
3 March 2025
Published:
28 March 2025
Abstract: This paper examines the role of language in postcolonial literature and argues amongst other things that language was a veritable weapon for colonial oppression and domination. It also focuses on the attempts made by Derek Walcott and Bate Besong to reassert their cultural identities through the innovative and experimental use of language. To effectively impose their dominance over the colonized people, language became a tool for the spread and propaganda of the colonial agenda. This paper uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of language to stress on concepts of hybridity and heteroglossia and how they manifest themselves in the plays of Derek Walcott and Bate Besong. The analyses stress that the playwrights’ successfully recreate, through language, the sensibilities and fractured postcolonial outlook of the societies they represent. Also, the playwrights both make a conscious attempt to indigenize and contextualize their plays through their use of language. Thus, the paper holds strong to the thesis that for any reader to better grapple with the different levels of meanings in the works of Walcott and Besong, particular attention has to be given to the playwrights’ experimental, instrumental and innovative use of language which in itself becomes a veritable weapon and a counter discourse to standardize (colonialist) English. As revolutionary playwrights therefore, the Walcott and Besong adopt the colonial language and manipulate it consciously not only as a mean of cultural assertion but most especially, to project their individual and collective experiences and identities.
Abstract: This paper examines the role of language in postcolonial literature and argues amongst other things that language was a veritable weapon for colonial oppression and domination. It also focuses on the attempts made by Derek Walcott and Bate Besong to reassert their cultural identities through the innovative and experimental use of language. To effec...
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Research Article
Research on the Construction of English Landscape in Kaifeng Scenic Areas from the Perspective of Intercultural Communication
Bao Jingxiu
,
Meng Xinxin,
Zhang Mengjie*
Issue:
Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2025
Pages:
41-50
Received:
6 April 2025
Accepted:
21 April 2025
Published:
22 May 2025
Abstract: Kaifeng, the eight-dynasty ancient capital, preserves the millennia cultural heritage of Bianjing, the Northern Song Dynasty’s imperial metropolis. Welcoming more than 100 million tourists annually, Kaifeng strategically positions its development as an international cultural tourism city, which closely aligns with the global communication needs of contemporary tourism, entrusting critical cultural dissemination missions to the construction of English landscapes within its scenic areas. This study, grounded in the cultural transmission medium attribute of linguistic landscape, adopts a corpus-based linguistic approach to systematically investigate 20 tourist attractions in Kaifeng. Combining quantitative statistics with qualitative analysis, the research reveals three dilemmas impeding cultural communication within Kaifeng’s English landscape development. First, the absence of standardized review mechanisms at the managerial level has hindered effective implementation of the Guidelines to English Usage in Public Services, resulting in inconsistent translation formats and compromised outlook of English landscape. Second, at the professional level, frequent grammatical errors and spelling mistakes significantly undermine the accurate conveyance of cultural information. Third, the communicative stratum confronts fractured cultural narratives, missing translations of important historical interpretations, and risks of cultural image loss and misinterpretation during transcoding processes. The findings emphasize that the professional standards of English landscape in scenic areas directly influence international tourists’ interest in exploring and the depth of their understanding of Song Dynasty culture. To surmount these challenges, systematic strategies are proposed, including establishing a quality supervision system for English landscape, fortifying professional talent cultivation, introducing foreign tourist feedback mechanisms, and enhancing cultural interpretation within English landscape. These measures collectively aim to elevate both language service standardization and cultural communication efficacy, ensuring Kaifeng’s status as a global cultural tourism hub and bringing the rich and profound Chinese culture to the world.
Abstract: Kaifeng, the eight-dynasty ancient capital, preserves the millennia cultural heritage of Bianjing, the Northern Song Dynasty’s imperial metropolis. Welcoming more than 100 million tourists annually, Kaifeng strategically positions its development as an international cultural tourism city, which closely aligns with the global communication needs of ...
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Research Article
Semiotic Readings, Postales De Orán of Oran by Joel Jover and La Peste of Albertle Camus
Kezia Zabrina Henry Knight*
Issue:
Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2025
Pages:
51-64
Received:
9 February 2025
Accepted:
28 February 2025
Published:
24 May 2025
Abstract: The present investigation develops an unprecedented way a semiotic perspective study of the series Postales de Orán the Cuban Visual Artist Joel Jover. This series means the first point of aesthetic turn within the whole of its previous work. The repercussion of it has exceeded national borders. Carried out in the context of a socially and economically convulsed period of the country and therefore of the author. After the fall of the socialist field in Eastern Europe in 1989, the social and political economic repercussions in the Cuban people began to feel in the nineties, it was defined as a special period. The context of realization will ponder the relevance of the series among other indices such as the references manifest to the hypotextext the novel La peste of Albert Camus. The author of the present investigation conducted the master's thesis in Latin American culture intithulated, Estudio semiótico de la serie Postales de Orán de Joel Jover. From this antecedent it is necessary as a general objective: to conduct a study by the series Postcards of Oran from a semiotic perspective for an interdiscursive, intratextual and intratextual knowledge of the imaginary universe. The methodology used is the text analysis. The work as text expands until it encompasses the vastness of its interrelationships with other texts, in the particular case of the study object predominates the text of Camus, La peste. The creation and interpretation are impelled and at the same time enriched by the universe of the discourse established by the previous texts of the author and who interprets (co-creator). Other specific intertexts have been selected in addition to the novel, such as the signs of Greco-Roan, Jewish, Russian, a holistic textual universe to enrich the analytical interpretation of the series. So that the theory of complex systems is also an analysis platform when reading the series as a textual system. In this sense, each pictorial work is seen as the manifestation of underlying processes. Likewise, it is emphasized in the analysis of the NO series as a static system closed abroad, always containing the same components, on the contrary, as an open system in a stable state (quasi) in which matter continuously enters from, and leaves towards the external environment.
Abstract: The present investigation develops an unprecedented way a semiotic perspective study of the series Postales de Orán the Cuban Visual Artist Joel Jover. This series means the first point of aesthetic turn within the whole of its previous work. The repercussion of it has exceeded national borders. Carried out in the context of a socially and economic...
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Research Article
Post Colonial Fiction and the Evolving Idea of the Nation
Issue:
Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2025
Pages:
65-69
Received:
3 May 2025
Accepted:
15 May 2025
Published:
18 June 2025
DOI:
10.11648/j.ellc.20251002.14
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Views:
Abstract: The article endeavours to interrogate the category of post-colonial literature which is usually defined as that which deals with issues of diaspora, hybridity, resistance to colonial oppression, marginalization through Othering, migration, and integration of cultures. However, literature written by those who have not traveled/immigrated to other places is not given the name of post-colonial fiction. Literature emerging from within previously colonized countries which deals with issues of civil strife, identarian politics, class, caste, gender and a host of other problems that are crucial to constructing pluralistic national identities is thus not given primacy. In order to discuss the construction of national identity in post-colonial fiction it is crucial to interrogate the historical narrative created to legitimize the dominant identity of the nation which this fiction challenges, or re-imagines. What are the consequences of selectively remembering the past; of highlighting some events in the nation's memory of its history while consciously attempting to suppress others? John Berger writes that a people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or a class than one that has been able to situate itself in history, and Walter Benjamin, writing in 1940 under the direct threat of a Fascist regime, points to the importance of the historical materialism in the task of brushing history against the grain which does not simply involve an interrogation of the past but more importantly involves asking questions of the present. Writers of post-colonial fiction in India such as Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Mukul Kesavan attempt to address issues concerning the writing, and the role, of historiography in relation to the ways in which national identities are constructed. They try to uncover the silences and omissions of the dominant historiography and the influence of these suppressed memories on the commonly received notions about the nation and its past. The elusive idea of the homogenous nation which was supposed to free the people from servitude has become the battleground for conflicting narratives between seats of power and the communities they marginalize and attempt to silence. The construction of national identity has become far more complex than it was at the time of decolonization. Therefore, there is an urgent need to redefine the category of post-colonial literature to account for the changing idea of the nation.
Abstract: The article endeavours to interrogate the category of post-colonial literature which is usually defined as that which deals with issues of diaspora, hybridity, resistance to colonial oppression, marginalization through Othering, migration, and integration of cultures. However, literature written by those who have not traveled/immigrated to other pl...
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