PERPETUAL STRIFE TO REARTICULATE DISCOURSE, MEANING, AND IDENTITY IN GORDIMER'S JULY'S PEOPLE: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Specific utilizations of language have the capacity to fabricate power positions for individuals or to locate them in peripheral positions. It is through on-going discursive practices that different discourses strive to foreground themselves and marginalize antagonistic discourses. As the process perpetuates, each discourse configures a particular identity and objectivity the sustainability of which depends on constant rearticulations of major concepts and preserving the previously settled meanings in a corresponding discourse. Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981) recounts the story of characters who are obliged to cope with identity crisis and uncertainty induced out of an envisioned end of apartheid. Pertaining to Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theories, the present study reveals that the characters' identities are shaped with regard to the sub-discourses of white, black, consumerism, materialism, patriarchy, and subjugated women. Discovering the orders of discourses in the novel renders that the discursive practices of the characters, the dichotomies in their identities, and the clashes in family structures are rooted in the struggles between major discourses of white and black, traditional and modern, as well as indigenous and foreign which have created divisions in the South African society. Finally, this study sheds light on understanding how the relations among discursive practices in a fictional text are associated with the conflicts among major discourses in the society.