Ableist Violence: Impoliteness Strategies in The Dramatic Discourse of Ola Rotimi’s Hopes of the Living Dead

Abstract

This study examines face threatening comments on persons with disability as violence. It investigates the impoliteness strategies in dialogic discourses of characters in the play, Hopes of the Living Dead by Ola Rotimi. The study argues that persons with disability are face threatened and attacked in their language exchanges with able characters in the play. The qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted for the study. Ten sentence extracts were purposively sampled for analysis. Adopting Jonathan Culpeper’s impoliteness theoretical framework, the findings reveal that five impoliteness super-strategies: bald on record impoliteness super-strategy, positive impoliteness super-strategy, negative impoliteness super-strategy, withhold impoliteness strategy and sarcasm impoliteness super-strategy are deployed in the violence against persons with disability in the play. The researchers recommend that regardless of people’s embodiment, “face” should be saved and not threatened to maintain the integrity of their humanity. The study, therefore, concludes that the play is a critique of the violating impoliteness in discourses with and about people with disability.