RESEMIOTISATION AND INTERTEXTUALITY IN MUSICAL DISCOURSES: THE SOCIOCULTURAL NARRATIVES OF ‘DUNUNA REVERSE’, A ZAMBIAN  POLITICAL PARTY CAMPAIGN SONG

Gabriel Simungala; Hambaba Jimaima; Trevor Mwansa

Gabriel Simungala University of Zambia
Hambaba Jimaima University of Zambia
Trevor Mwansa University of Zambia

Keywords: Patriotic Front, Musicology, Campaign Song, Zambia, Resemiotisation, Intertextuality

Abstract

We draw on ‘Dununa Reverse’, the Patriotic Front’s 2016 campaign song to argue that the lyrics are politically charged discourses best understood as semiotic assemblages. As our locus, we foreground resemiotisation and intertextuality as defining attributes for the production and the consumption of political messages to leverage on the sociological construct upon which the voters’ lifeworld is built. This is in a quest to trace and glean sociocultural narratives that often inform the Zambian people. Thus, the article is guided by three interrelated objectives. Firstly, it intends to interrogate the notion of translanguaging to show how artists deploy various semiotic resources at their disposal while ‘sliding in and out’ of multiple languages such that the perceived boundaries among languages become blurry. Secondly, the article attempts to show how sociocultural discourses are resemiotised from different sources, including the lived experiences of the people to musicology. Lastly, taking the lyrics of the song as a text, the article intends to explore how individual texts are inescapably related to other texts in a matrix of irreducible plural and provisional meanings.

Author Biographies

Gabriel Simungala, University of Zambia

Gabriel Simungala is a special research fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and a lecturer of sociolinguistics in the Department of Arts, Languages and Literary Studies at the University of Zambia. He has published extensively in language education, youth and pop culture, critical and multimodal discourse analysis, globalisation and mobility, linguistic/semiotic landscapes, Bantu linguistics and the sociolinguistics of language contact. His recent publications include Legitimisation and Recontextualisation of Languages: The Imbalance of Powers in a Multilingual Landscape, among others.

Hambaba Jimaima, University of Zambia

Hambaba Jimaima holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arts, Languages and Literary Studies at the University of Zambia. His research interests revolve around semiotics, multilingual memory and multimodality, predicated on language production and consumption in the public spaces as expressed in the published works on: ORCID: 0000-0001-7535-2033.

Trevor Mwansa, University of Zambia

CONTRIBUTORS Trevor Mwansa is a lecturer in the Department of Arts, Languages and Literary Studies at the University of Zambia. His teaching and research interests include among others, literary theory, poetry, African literature, African-American literature, American literature, English literature, culture, education, leadership, eco-criticism, modernism and post-modernism. His recent publication is dubbed: ‘Coping with Racism: An Analysis of Defence Mechanisms Employed by Lubinda in Dominic Muliasho’s The Tongue of the Dumb’.