In the novel, the escaped American slave Fredrick Douglass struggles to come to terms with the language around slavery, being owned, and freedom while seeking support and funding from the Irish for American abolitionism. Colum McCann confronts this theory of language in his novel TransAtlantic. When people in power use language in a strategic way in order to control the way the world is perceived, it is easy to become unknowingly indoctrinated. By constructing language in a strategic way, one can influence your linguistic determination, directly affecting your perception of what you think and see around you. The formation of thought is formed by the language in which the thought is expressed, not by an individual's independent processes. Thiong'o suggests that language has a much stronger effect on an individual than one might expect.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan novelist and post-colonial theorist, argues that "he choice of language and the use of language is central to a people's definition of themselves in relation to the entire universe" in his book Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (4).
0 kommentar(er)
