by Melissa Miles McCarter

Created on: November 07, 2009   Last Updated: November 08, 2009

Slumdog Millionaire demonstrates the interactions between postmodernism, post-colonialism and discursive practices that reveal how orality and literacy function within certain communities. Specifically, language functions within the movie to illuminate postmodern notions of community. According to Diane Davis, communitarian literacy is not about exclusions, even though in many cultures, literacy can be seen as a way to stratify people and organize them in specific dynamics which prevent true connection beyond notions of identity, class, or other social categories. This stratification can be seen in Slumdog Millionaire in the social pressures that the young characters face, whether it is trying to survive the slums they grew up in, escape the control of gangsters or function within a corporate dominated worldall situations determined by the social conditions of first colonialism and then postcolonialism.

The community and literacy that functions within this community are all the result of a postcolonial reality. This reality does not readily accept communitarian literacy, which bridges the gap of fragmented individuals who exist in a postmodern context.Primarily, the literacy that functions within Slumdog Millionaire is concerned with survival, what Giorgio Agamben claims is a notion of bare life. This survival orientation can be seen throughout the movie in relationship to the various forms discursive practices take, whether through orality or written communication, or what Walter Ong calls primary and secondary orality.

These different forms of literacy are reinforced by the function of narrativity throughout the events that take place in the film. In other words, each choice that Jamal makes is shaped by the language practices available to him, balanced between the primal desire to survive and the communitarian desire for connection. Jamal's individual predicament represents the tension between the modern colonial context and the postmodern postcolonial transition seen in present day.

First of all, the movie asks the question, why did the main character, Jamal, win the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? even though Jamal is a product of the Mumbai slums? The answer to this question, rather than the possibility Jamal cheated, was lucky, or possessed genius, is rooted in literacy, where the events which led up to the win were written. Implied in the eventual answer It was written, is that the events in Jamal's life were the result of destiny, or perhaps divine

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