BECOMING THE OTHER:THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE LAST WHITE MAN

Abstract

Mohsin Hamid's novel The Last White Man is a story of racial metamorphosis which highlights various socio-political and personal aspects of racial discrimination, and critiques the prejudicial construction of power hierarchies in the society. This paper attempts to analyse the construction of these hierarchies and the discourses that support them, by studying the language choices of the text. Power and identity are built upon certain ideologies created through discourses, which are constituted by language. This is why a clear understanding of the novel’s linguistic strategies will lead to a deeper understanding of the discourses of difference that play an essential role in the politics of identity in the novel. By using Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study aims to explore how language choices and discursive practices participate in the changing power structures in Anders’s world and evoke themes such as self-victimisation as a means of justifying racial prejudice. The rationale behind choosing the DHA as the theoretical model to conduct this research lies in the fact that this approach is deeply interested in unjustified discrimination and provides a highly categorical model for the linguistic analysis. It takes into account the historical, cultural and racial dimensions whilst analysing a text, and also integrates an ‘insider view’ from a victim of such discrimination. The paper will aid fellow researchers in studying how identity informs the power structures in Anders’s world, and in studying the inversion of those structures as a result of the physical metamorphosis.