Rainbow : Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Culture Studies

Sisterhood as a means of resisting patriarchy in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter

2023-10-29T07:20:48+07:00

Space and role restrictions, social disparities, cultural disintegration, and political confrontations are just a few of the difficulties that African women often face. This article aims to show how women negotiate their space within such limitations through female friendship, solidarity, and sisterhood as legitimate tools of female bonding and feasible means for the woman’s educational, political and economic independence in Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. This novel raises concerns about the extent to which the consciousness, or the actual experience of patriarchal abuse in its various shapes, brings women from different socio-economic backgrounds closer together, furnishing them with a device of resistance in a highly antagonistic social environment, and enabling them to appreciate women’s empowerment, and to extend female friendship into female solidarity that participates in nation building.

Speech act and experiential analysis of Bali netizen reactions to the pandemic regulation posts

2023-10-29T07:20:49+07:00

Social media has enabled individuals to publicly express their feelings, opinions, or sentiments about specific issues, including government policies. The accumulation of similar views from social media users can represent how the public perceives certain matters. The research was done by analysing netizen comments on posts regarding the pandemic regulation in Bali from August to November 2021 in a popular Instagram local news account Infodenpasar. The research employs the theory of speech act to describe the illocutionary force of netizen utterances to express particular sentiments and the systemic functional theory about experiential metafunction to explore the construal of participants and actions in the discourse. The finding shows that the most dominant speech act is conflictive, which expresses disbelief, complaint, and skepticism. In addition, the events in the clauses are constructed with various processes and participant types, especially relational process

The dislocation of Nigerian identities as the result of hegemony in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

2023-10-29T07:20:49+07:00

The concept of individuality's sense of self may trigger some conflicts in an ex-colonized country. The British colonized Nigeria for sixty years, and the colonization formally ended after Nigeria declared its independence on the first of October, 1960. A new Nigerian dictatorial government performs hegemony as the remnant of colonization. This phenomenon is represented in Purple Hibiscus, which is based on the military dictatorship in Nigeria between 1980 and 1999. This study aims to find the forms of hegemony and its negative impacts on the dislocation of identity. The research method is qualitative. The data is analyzed by Gramsci's hegemony and is supported by the concept of diaspora in postcolonialism. The data is obtained based on the dominant and subordinate conflicts. Purple Hibiscus presents three forms of hegemony: restricted media, religion, and the English language. The novel shows the negative impacts of hegemony: isolation, no individual choices, oppression, and dislocation of identity. The process of identity dislocation is portrayed through emotional attachment and the realization of life-changing seen through the acceptance and interaction with American people with different backgrounds, diverse cultures, and distinct environments.

Unravelling students’ emotions of online learning during the pandemic through metaphors

2023-10-29T07:20:49+07:00

In 2020, the unpredictable COVID-19 pandemic shook many parts of the world, including Indonesia. The pandemic affected almost all walks of life, and the education world was no exception. This study aims to unravel the students’ emotions about online learning during the pandemic through metaphors in the poems they wrote. This study draws on theories of metaphors, and the data were gained from poems written by five second-year students majoring in English Language and Literature Program. The metaphors analyzed in the poems revealed that students generally had negative emotions towards online learning, leading to feelings of frustration, despair and demotivation. A number of external and internal factors contributed to such feelings among students. This study calls for the need to listen to students’ voices in order to create mutual understanding between teachers and students and to create a more enjoyable learning atmosphere.

Shame, secrets and gossip in ‘The Maid Servant's Story’

2023-10-29T07:20:49+07:00

‘The Maid Servant’s Story’ is one of the short stories featured in Chitra Banerjee’s book ‘Arranged Marriage’. The short stories in this book seem to share similar themes such as female suffering and emancipation, the immigrant experience, cultural differences between the East and the West as well as a few other themes. In ‘The Maid Servant’s Story’, we are introduced to Manisha who is an Indian young woman educated in the United States. She is very close with her aunt, Mashi, and through the latter’s storytelling, she learns of a heart-breaking secret in her family involving class and gender differences. This study aims to examine the representations of silence involving shame, secrets, and gossip in this particular text. The method used in this study is a qualitative study analyzed by the postcolonial feminist approach. The results showed that the author portrayed particular characters as showing a tendency to remain silent or having a lack of verbal response to a) shame, as a result of having failed to live up to people’s social and moral expectations, b) secrets, as this can jeopardize another person’s well-being, and c) gossips, which serves as a mechanism to control the behaviour of dominant individuals, but can also be used to threaten a family’s social and prestigious status.

How do I sound? Vowel production of multilingual students at Ma Chung University

2023-10-29T07:20:50+07:00

This study aims to evaluate the Indonesian, English, and Mandarin vowel production of Ma Chung University students, a prominent Indonesian institution with a strong emphasis on workforce readiness. Given the university's language offerings encompassing Indonesian, English, and Mandarin, we employed a descriptive qualitative approach in acoustic-phonetic theory. Our respondent pool comprised of 15 PPBM (Chinese language major) students selected based on intermediate proficiency levels in all three languages, as indicated by TOEIC and HSK scores. First and second formant data for monophthongs were recorded in PRAAT tools and the data is compiled on Microsoft Excel, forming the foundation for Vowel Space Area (VSA). The data reveals a notable phenomenon: students' native language (Indonesian) influences their pronunciation of both the second (English) and third (Mandarin) languages. Particularly, English displays a distinct pattern of compressed vowel spread compared to the standard VSA table due to the lingering impact of L1 VSA. This effect accounts for observed vowel anomalies in student pronunciation. Importantly, this L1 and L2 influence is evident in their attempts to articulate L3 (Mandarin) sounds, exemplified by the significant deviation of /ə/ from the VSA. Moreover, students navigate a linguistic shift by modifying phonemes to align with their L1, inadvertently resulting in substantial deviations during English and Mandarin speech production.

Cultural shifts in Lombok: During and after the COVID-19 pandemic

2023-10-29T07:20:50+07:00

The COVID-19 outbreak had various impacts on human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic affected economic activities, social life, and culture, leading people to adapt to new rules and circumstances. This study aims to identify cultural activities in Lombok, such as Nyongkolan, Begibung, and Maulidan that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and to analyze the pattern of their changes. This study employs a qualitative descriptive method. This study employs various data collection techniques, including observation, interviews, and questionnaires. The findings suggest that cultural activities have temporarily shifted to adhere to government instructions aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. After the pandemic COVID-19 ends, these cultural activities are conducted in the same way as before the pandemic. However, a small number of community groups still carry out the culture of Begibung as it was during the pandemic COVID-19 on the grounds that the modifications they applied during the pandemic are more effective and efficient, so it is good to be maintained while not eliminating the essence of the Begibung itself.

Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights: Exploring Children and Myths as the Intrinsic Formulation in an Adventure Story

2023-10-29T07:20:50+07:00

This study investigates a novel entitled Northern Lights (1995), authored by Philip Pullman as a fantasy fiction in the context of popular literature. The aim of this study is to reveal the significance of children and myth characters as the formula and the intrinsic formulation of this novel as an adventure story. As a textual study, this study uses a narrative analysis method that can help to explore the intrinsic elements of prose fiction. The relevant data collected and analyzed in this study are narrations or dialogues that refer to particular acts and speech of characters, settings of place, theme, and plot in the novel. All data are analyzed to disclose the conception of children and myths used as the basic formula of this novel. At the end of the analysis, the investigation reveals the significance of children and myth characters in this novel. They are seemingly used to attract readers’ interest and concern in transcending their imagination boundaries in their daily lives. Besides, this study can also explicate how they are intrinsically formulated in an adventure story.

The Portrayal of Women’s Power Ambivalence: in Literature- to- Film Adaptation of Enola Holmes

2023-10-29T07:20:50+07:00

The pursuit of dreams by women often results in a complex state of ambivalence, as they contend with societal, familial, and personal obstacles. This underscores the need for a new cultural narrative that reconciles the strengths and weaknesses of women. Our research focuses on examining the portrayal of woman's power in the novel and film Enola Holmes. Utilizing a qualitative approach and Betty Friedan's liberal feminism as a framework, we explore the multifaceted nature of female empowerment as represented by the character Enola Holmes. Our findings reveal that Enola's aspiration to become a detective symbolizes female empowerment but is marked by ambivalence. A form of ambivalence can be seen when Enola ends up in boarding school, falls in love with a man, gets help from male friend, gets a culture shock, and uses the name “Holmes”; Eudoria’s absence after her enthusiastic efforts of teaching Enola and making a plan for reform bill with her feminist movement; Dowager's plan to kill Tewkesbury is defeated by Enola Holmes and Tewkesbury; women oppressing women through the character Enola Holmes fights Edith and Enola Holmes argues Miss Harrison. Therefore, these complexities suggest a paradox: efforts to challenge patriarchal norms can inadvertently reinforce the culture they seek to change. In conclusion, our study highlights the nuanced nature of female empowerment in "Enola Holmes," offering insights into the intricate interplay between women's agency and societal norms in the ongoing struggle for gender equality.