Discourse Of Dissent: Languaging Resistance And Consciousness In Subaltern Literatures – Dalit And Black

• Published in: Studies in Linguistics, Culture and FLT (Online) Vol. 12; no. 2; pp. 144 - 166
• Main Authors: Kumar, Chandan, Thomas, Nivea K
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen 2024; Шуменски университет »Епископ Константин Преславски
• Subjects: Language and Literature Studies; Theory of Literature; Black and Dalit literatures; distributed language; subaltern literature; languaging; multilingualism
• ISSN: 2534-952X; 2534-9538

The paper highlights the pivotal role of language in Afro-American and Dalit movements, emphasizing identity affirmation and resistance to dominant aesthetic structures. It examines language’s dynamic role in shaping subaltern experiences and fuelling revolutionary movements. While there is some analysis of the significance of literary trends and intellectual current in these parallel movements, a few scholarly inquiries integrate the linguistic and stylistic aspects comprehensively. The study addresses this critical gap by comparing and contrasting the selected study of these two movements to see their convergences and divergences. We employ the theoretical framework of Subaltern Studies and Distributed Language (DL) to understand socio-political motifs of pre- and post-production of a particular kind of language. The selected poems are closely read and analysed through Critical Discourse Analysis, with close reading as a key technique. It allows for an exploration of the intricate relationship between the linguistic structure, use of lexical items, emotive use of language, connotational significations, and compositional semantics. While selected Black literature poems experimented with internal morpho-syntax and everyday language, Dalit literature bluntly presented harsh facts using multilingualism, a unique Indian linguistic trait, and everyday vocabulary.