EXAMINING FOREGROUNDING AS A STRATEGY FOR IDENTITY MAINTENANCE THROUGH STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF AFRO-AMERICAN POETRY

Abstract

This study investigates the use of foregrounding that involves deviation and parallelism as a strategy to maintain the identity and disclose racial discrimination in poetry of Langston Hughes, a famous twentieth-century Afro-American poet during Harlem Renaissance. By adopting qualitative approach, researchers selected three different poems from three different volumes of Hughes’s poetry by adopting random sampling technique and analyzed them by applying theory of foregrounding presented by Leech (1969). The foregrounding, a stylistic device emphasizing certain linguistic features to create emphasis or deviation from normative language patterns, serves as means for the poets to reclaim agency and articulate their unique experiences, histories, and perspectives. Researchers found that Hughes’s poetry presents many foregrounded features on different levels, i.e., phonological, graphological, grammatical and semantic. The findings show that these foregrounded features upon different linguistic levels help the poet to maintain his identity and disclose racial discrimination. Therefore, these foregrounding features also help the poet revolt against the racial discrimination.