International Journal of Language & Literature

Apartheid and Writing: White Supremacist Logic and the Racially Damaging Injures It Causes, From Derrida’s and Gate’s Perspectives
Dr. José Endoença Martins

Abstract
The article approximates Derrida’s and Gates’s personal concerns about racial differences and state racisms. In Racism’s Last Word, Derrida (1986) investigates the meaning of the word Apartheid. Written nearly a decade before Mandela dismantles the state racist regime ruling the life of South Africans, Derrida’s text denounces that Apartheid “institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. As a system of marks, it outlines spaces in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates.” The reflections exposed by Gates in the article Writing “Race” and the Difference it Makes explains how writing and freedom cooperate mutually, leading poet Phillis Wheatley to struggle to keep institutional racism at bay. The use of language in writing, Gates argues, “signifies the difference between cultures and their possession of power, spelling out the distance between subordinate and super ordinate, between bondman and lord in terms of their “race.” In both Derrida’s and Gates’s thoughts, artistic use of language – painting, writing or both – becomes potential antidote against “relegating black people to walking abstractions, lustful creatures or invisible objects.”

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v5n1a15