Semiotic staging of the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship: A social-semiotic approach

This paper presents a social semiotic analysis to explore the extent to which the ideological point of view in Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship (1967) has been semiotically communicated by a number of oppositional signs: visual (darkness versus light), audible (loud/hard music versus low/soft music), and vocalic (scream versus laughter). More specifically, this paper explores the six signs’ semiotic potential for making meaning by shedding light on the way they operate as conduits of the ideological viewpoint and the way their semiotic staging is textually associated with particular linguistic indicators guiding the pragmatic interpretation of the play. To this end, the paper draws on two theoretical strands: a social semiotic approach as introduced by Hodge and Kress (1988), Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), and van Leeuwen (2005); and Short’s (1996) checklist of linguistic indicators of viewpoint. Two main findings are revealed here: first, the six signs are carriers of the ideological viewpoint by acting as action predictors and motivators, suffering signals, suffering-source highlighters, apathy and arrogance indicators, situation commentators, and call-response markers; and, second, the six signs serve as narratorial mediators, representing the dramatic equivalents of third-person narrators in prose fiction.