Get up, stand up: análise do discurso de resistência no reggae de Bob Marley

Abstract

Every man gotta the right to decide his own destiny, and in this judgment there is no partiality. This is how Bob Marley's Zimbabwe music begins and shows off the political-discursiveness that characterizes reggae's resistance speech. This work aims to make a descriptiveinterpretative analysis on Bob Marley’s reggae in order to identify the elements that prove the use of language to oppose, protest and resist. Other objectives include presenting the production conditions that affect the subject in his discursive practices, and point out the meaning effects of discourse as a whole. The justification for this endeavor is in the social relevance of reggae that was recently named by UNESCO as a global cultural treasure, which implies the need for academic works to better understand this form of language use as a discourse of resistance. This work follows Pêcheux's (2002) proposal to define discourse as structure and event, as well as this author's conception of the modalities of position taking (PÊCHEUX, 1995) that characterize the subject form of discourse as “good-subject ”(first modality), “bad-subject” (second modality), and the subject who disidentifies with the form of the universal Subject (third modality). The methodology follows Pêcheux's assumptions (1995, 1997, 2002), and is complemented by Orlandi's work proposals (2000, 2001, 2007). Highlight for Discourse Analysis: Principles and Procedures (2000), in which Orlandi asks about what kind of listening the analyst must establish in order to hear beyond the evidence, placing the saying in relation to the unspoken, and thus being able to point out the speech as a moving word, as a path from which the subject is analyzed in his social practice. Among the results provided in this work, we highlight the importance of the debate on social, racial and historical issues regarding the inequalities arising from colonialism with the kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples. In this sense, the reggae discourse of resistance is characterized by a message of call for social mobilization against mental slavery present in cultural and ideological processes of standardization of the senses and the subject form of the discourse and that, more broadly, contributed historically for the support of a philosophy that divides society into first and second class citizens.