scholarly journals The Construction of Insider - Outsider in Anglophone Writings from Northeast India

Author(s):  
Debajyoti Biswas ◽  
Rupanjit Das

The works of three writers from northeast India, Temsula Aos These Hills Called Home , Mamang Dais Stupid Cupid and Anjum Hasans Lunatic in my Head that cover the problem of identity in relation to the insider - outsider politics in the region are examined. The northeast India is in many ways a miniature India because it houses people from various ethnicity and linguistic groups. However, much of the immigration took place after the East India Company annexed the northeast region starting from 1826. The extraction of the resources and subjugation of the people in this region by the colonisers and later by successive Indian governments has left an indelible mark of cultural imperialism triggering social haemorrhage. This changing position of the insider - outsider is not only a part of the political discourse but also the literature that is produced in this region. The analysis of the writings of Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai, and Anjum Hasan allows to look at the problem from two perspectives: the indigenous population experiencing anxiety and leading various violent campaigns to expel so-called outsiders, and the northeasterners facing similar racial prejudices when visiting mainland India and being subjected to derogatory racial slurs.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Jacob

The main objective behind the parliamentary practice of Question Period is to ensure that the government is held accountable to the people. Rather than being a political accountability tool and a showcase of public discourse, these deliberations are most often displays of vitriolic political rhetoric. I will be focusing my research on the ways in which incivil political discourse permeates the political mediascape with respect to one instance in Canadian politics - the acquisition of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. I believe that incivility in the political discourse of Question Period must be understood within the mechanics of the contemporary public sphere. By interrogating the complexities of how political discourse is being mediatized, produced and consumed within the prevailing ideological paradigms, I identify some of the contemporary social, cultural and political practices that produce incivility in parliamentary discourse.


Author(s):  
Nadia Anuar ◽  
Nurizah Md Ngadiran

The use of politeness strategies has received increasing attention in the political discourse as a powerful persuasion tool. These strategies became critical for the newly appointed prime minister of Malaysia, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, to convince Malaysians that he is qualified to lead the country during a political upheaval and global pandemic. Thus, the objectives of this paper are to identify the types and frequency of the politeness strategies used by Muhyiddin Yassin in his maiden speech as the eighth prime minister of Malaysia. Two categories of politeness strategies based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) were examined, which are negative strategies and positive strategies. The speech text was obtained from the official website of Prime Minister’s Office and was translated to English for analysis. The translated speech was subsequently checked for validity. Document analysis was used to analyse the translated speech text to determine the types and frequency of the politeness strategies. The analysis revealed that positive politeness strategies were significantly used (88%) compared to negative politeness strategies (12%). The most dominantly used positive politeness strategy was “notice and attend to the receiver’s need, interest, or want” while “use of exaggeration”, “seek agreement”, and “avoid disagreement” were the least used strategy. In contrast, “question” and “giving deference” were identified to be the most frequently used negative politeness strategy. The present study extends our knowledge on the use of politeness strategies in a political speech in an Asian setting, which is notably lacking in the literature.


Author(s):  
Benson Eluma ◽  
Yinka Olarinmoye

For democracy to become the political culture in Nigeria, the discourse of politics has to be conducted through expressive mechanisms owned by the people. In the absence of popular ownership of political language, the road to disconnect, apathy and disenfranchisement lies wide open. We take the view that the problem of politics is located squarely in the public sphere and that discourse is the activity that characterizes the public sphere. We raise the point that the sociolinguistic environment in the country does not encourage whole masses of Nigerians to talk politics in languages in which they can freely articulate their positions and present their aspirations. We posit that citizens are disenfranchised and rendered inaudible and invisible to the extent to which they cannot undertake political discourse with an appreciable measure of linguistic ease. The benefits of diversity are endangered as many people and entire groups in Nigeria lose the means of expressing their political views and opinions, let alone political projects and programmes. Invoking Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, we make a blanket case for the viability of each and every extant language in Nigeria for political discourse if such usage is actively promoted among their respective communities of users.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-269
Author(s):  
Wichuda Satidporn ◽  
Stithorn Thananithichot

Abstract Why do Thai governments fail in maintaining peace through conducting a reconciliation process? This article answers this question through an assessment of how the term reconciliation has been defined and used by the Thai governments and political leaders during the past decades. This article finds that the political conflicts in Thailand have never been solved because several times, reconciliation in the Thai language is a term that has been dynamically interpreted and applied by leaders of the conflicting groups as a means to defeat the people of the opposing groups rather that a means of resolving problems and reconciling society.


The article examines issues of political manipulation from the linguistic point of view. Diversified review of studies of the phenomenon of political manipulation was accomplished and the role of means of language in the process of manipulation was described. It is postulated that manipulation inherently belongs to the people`s speech and in particular to the speech of the politicians. In this respect, it is deemed to be wrong to study manipulation in an exclusively negative light. The focus of the research is the effect of the manipulatory impact and this interest is predetermined by the emphasis on the linguo-pragmatic aspects of communication. Political discourse is characterized by manipulative features in order to conduct a propaganda conflict, which is achieved using various linguistic units and methods, such as nominalization, euphemisms, precedent phenomena. The political discourse of the media has a huge impact on the formation of public opinion, which is done with the help of the above tools of speech manipulation. The article examines the features of manipulative technologies of political discourse. The severity of the problem of the manipulative potential of speech is determined by direct communication between the institutionalized addressee and the mass addressee, which takes place in the political discourse of the media. A brief analysis of the types of manipulation depending on the nature of information transformations is given, which determines the presence of specific features of the language of politics, as well as the use of special tools that contribute to the implementation of the main functions of political discourse. According to the author, the media are forming a new political reality in which manipulation technologies become a key instrument of political behaviour of the masses.


1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radhika Singha

In his historical defence of the record of the East India Company in India Kaye headed his chapter on thuggee with the following summary of contents: ‘Thuggee—Increased knowledge of the Habits of the People—Its Results’. It was with the flourish of mystery unveiled and mastered that a group of officers of the Political Department had lobbied for special operations against this ‘murderous fraternity’ and for special laws to deal with it.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110257
Author(s):  
Joseph Grim Feinberg

This paper engages with radical democratic theory in light of the so-called ‘return of the people’ taking place in contemporary political discourse. I argue that the return of the people should not be seen only as a return of politics strictly speaking, but also as a process by which elements of the social that had previously been excluded from politics enter the political sphere. Framing the problem in this way calls for a view to how politics is circumscribed, distinguished from the social but also, at various moments, broken open. At the same time, I call for paying increased attention to how the notion of the people takes shape beyond the political sphere, off the metaphorical political stage. By examining how the people is constructed in cultural and social movements, off the political stage, we can better understand the form taken by the people when it appears in politics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (S29) ◽  
pp. 181-214
Author(s):  
Vincent Bonnecase

AbstractIn the early 1990s, Niger saw growing anger towards the military regime in power, not only because of police violence, but also due to its economic and social policies, particularly its first structural adjustment programme. After several months of revolts, the regime fell, giving way to a democratic government in 1991. Under pressure from international financial institutions, the new government quickly embarked on the same economic and social path as the previous one and adopted an adjustment policy, resistance to which had played a fundamental role in its accession to power. The government faced increasing street protests, and was overthrown by the army in January 1996, with most of the population not mobilizing to protect the democratic institutions. This article examines the conflicts of rationales that marked these few years, and shows how, by whom, and to what extent these rationales were opposed in practical terms. It also offers a social history of the adjustments by looking at how they were received by the people. By so doing, it looks back at a moment that has profoundly marked Niger's recent history: in this country, as in others, the adjustments have reconfigured rivalries, produced violence, and left an indelible mark on the political imaginary up to the present day.


Author(s):  
Т. М. Князь

The political worldview as a part of the national worldview is an open structure that is constantly evolving. The language political worldview is a complex of representations of the people, recorded in the language units about political reality at a certain stage of society development. The phraseology of the Ukrainian language depends directly on the language political world-view, therefore the phraseological units (PhU) in some way form national and cultural peculiarity of political discourse. Investigation of the specific features of functioning phraseological units is an effective way to study the representations of the language speakes about political reality, its interpretation, indicating the relevance of the proposed article The article analyzes the peculiarities of the PhU functioning in the Ukrainian political discourse. The types of structural and semantic transformations of phraseological units are ellipse, substitution, expansion of component composition have been investigated. In political discourse both traditional and transformed phraseological units accurately characterize current events: financial issues, cooperation with partners, warning about the negative consequences of wrong actions, etc. Diferrent by semantics and structure phraseological units are used in accordance with the linguistic situation, context, author’s thought etc. Transformed phraseological unit загравав із проросійським електоратом (the traditional PhU гратися (грати) з вогнем «to behave carelessly, to do something dangerous») is applied to express the author’s assessment, the attitude to the political situation. The function of phraseological units in the political discourse makes it informative and expressive, and thus one of the main functions, influential, is realized. PhUs not only as nominative, but also as estimated units are used with the aim of realization of the unity of rational and emotional information in the text.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 415
Author(s):  
Hanaa Ali AlQahtani

Discourse is an important tool discussing social relations in the discursive patterns. A well-designed discourse can easily dominate people and can construct their perceptions. Therefore, discourse is critical in the political world when one uses it to communicate ideas and visions to the people. Therefore, the present study aims to identify the elements of gender references, persuasive techniques, and social interactions associated with political discourse of Hillary Clinton. The study has used the framework of conversation analysis for studying a total of three interviews and five debates of Hillary Clinton. The interviews and recording were extracted from YouTube and then transcribed and interpreted by converting them into text. The findings have revealed a significant use of persuasive techniques and social interaction in Clinton’s political discourse. The results also imply that using affiliation strategy, candidates can manipulate people. The study concludes that this strategy is more effective in representing oneself as truthful as compared to conventional narratives.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document