1887
Volume 18, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1387-6740
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9935
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Current studies within narrative analysis and sociolinguistics have shown that identities are emergent and negotiated in current talk and, thus, not pre-existing the now and then of a given interaction. This article presents the analysis of a story told by a black Brazilian woman describing an episode of racial discrimination between two black characters in which prejudice was transmitted through the voice of a white figure. While the storyteller articulates the multi-layered voicing in her story, she also portrays relationships and makes identity claims for herself while also drawing on, and sometimes contradicting, prevailing ideologies of race and racism in her culture. I analyze the linguistic means through which the narrator constructs different positioning levels (Bamberg, 1997) while the roles of author, figure and principal (Goffman, 1981) shift to represent the actions performed in the story world by its different characters. The narrator’s main strategies are the lamination of the characters’ speech through constructed dialogue and references to skin color, which enable her to interpret the episode of discrimination toward an individual of the same race.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ni.18.1.06fla
2008-01-01
2025-02-14
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ni.18.1.06fla
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): constructed dialogue; identity; positioning; racial discrimination; stories
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error