AUTHORS AS SOCIAL LEADERS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF COUNTER NARRATIVES IN POSTCOLONIAL AND MARGINAL LITERATURE

Abstract

Literature acts as a dynamic situate of an ideological struggle where leading power organizations, especially those of historical conquest and colonialism, are both propagated and challenged. The current study aims to investigate how postcolonial and marginal authors played their role in social leadership by creating potent counter-narratives that counterfeit new identities, restore the lost histories, and model alternative futures. The objectives of the study is to analyze the linguistic and narrative strategies used in seminal novels; “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe, “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy, “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, and “Season of Migration to the North” by Tayab Salih was examined to notice that how these colonial literature works to empower marginalized voices and proposition substitute models of social leadership. This study adopt qualitative approach, as methodology used Norman Fairclough’s three dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis framework. This consist of describing key literary elements such as metaphor and narrative structure elucidating their discursive process, and read between the lines their role within wide social practices of power and resistance. Findings of the study showed that authors played their role as an agent of “linguistic treason” by integrating local linguistic configurations into English, using language as a direct tool of resistance against power. Moreover, the use of disjointed, non-linear narratives successfully challenges official histories of a colonial state. It is concluded that colonial and marginal novels deconstruct dominant discourses and demonstrate the evolution of social leadership from solitary hero’s to collaborative forms, thereby colonial and marginal authors themselves played the transformative role of social leaders or social agent.