Abstract

The paper explores the theme of domination and autocratic use of power and their implications in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. The focus of the paper is on how power and domination fluctuates in social relationships in the novel. The general aim of the essay is to examine how linguistic sets in the text are sundered by different hegemonic practices and ideologies, with a viewto showing how the novel is the site of boiling cauldron of unresolved issues of power and hegemony. This approach is significant because it examines the issues of authoritarian discourse in the novel and how this generates conflicting ideologies. The major finding is that autocratic power and hegemonic practices are resisted by folkloric and parabolic discourse narrative strategies. The theoretical framework adopted in this paper is eclectic. It follows studies in Halliday and Fowler on how lexical and syntactic frames reveal plurality of ideologies, particularly on Fowler’s analyses of linguistic items from their ideological perspectives. The paper further draws insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and from Michel Foucault’s theory of power. This is because language is the channel through which power relations are revealed. The interpersonal relationship between characters in the novel reveals various dimensions of power and hegemonic practices. Therefore, the paper concludes that despite the constraining principles of authoritarian power, there is a resistant consciousness which reconstructs  experience which reveals the dyadic structure of power and shows language and power relations in diverse forms in the novel

Keywords

Achebe, Language, power, discourse, autocratic, ideologies