Conflicting Narrative Identity Formation in Racialized Intercultural Discourse
Conflicting Narrative Identity Formation in Racialized Intercultural Discourse

Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist – A Cognitive Narratological Approach

Summary/Abstract: The paper addresses the issue of how racialized intercultural relations can problematize the formation of narrative identity. How it can call in question the narratability of racialized subjectivity and lead to conflicting narrative identites of the same character as inferrible from narratorial discourse, vis-à-vis the way the character views itself in its intramental activity. And how all of this follows from, and is traceable through the manifestations of, racialized cognitive architecture, and thus, paradoxically, unnarratability can become the source of narrativity. The conflicting nature of racialized subjectivity and narrative identity formation will be examined, then, through a socio-cognitive lens. This study will draw on Nadine Gordimer’s apartheid-era novel, The Conservationist (1974) as a tutor text and will be informed especially by colonial/postcolonial theory, cultural as well as cognitive narratology, cognitive cultural studies, theories of intercultural communication, and discourse analysis.

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