Author: Abbas Lutfi Hussein, Suha Walid Sadaq Hussein Alzahiry

Abstract: This paper adopts van Dijk's socio-critical discourse analytical framework to interrogate the theme of alienation in Lamming's novel In the Castle of my Skin.Although the theme of alienation has been widely disscussed in literary and postcolonial studies ,there remains a lack of integrated approaches combing alienation and sociocognitive analysis , therefore in the field of critical discourse analysis ,scholars like van Dijk and van Leeuwen have developed frameworks for exploring ideologies and representations of social actors ,similarly Harts has presented cognitive models that explores how discourse structures reflect and view underlying cognitive operations and in addition to that these models are widely applied tp media discourse and political speeches but still their application to literary texts are remained underexplored and little scholars efforts has been devoted to examing alienation from a socio cognitive perspectives .therefore this study seeks to fill this gap by adopting a sociocognitive analysis framework that combine three models :van Dijk(ideological square ),Harts (construal operations ),and van Leeuwen (social actors representations). By using both qualitative and quantitative assessments of carefully selected textual extracts, the research scrutinises the construction of alienation in terms of micro-level representation in social actors, cognitive level construal operations, and macro-level ideological configurations. The results show that Lamming employs exclusionary and assimilative linguistic strategies to represent ruptured social relations and personal isolation in the colonial context. Cognitive construals are used to make alienation a tangible reality by profiling and metaphorical framing while ideological polarisation advances an anti-colonial moral vindication by framing the colonial agents negatively and positively reinforcing Black communal resilience. Consequently, alienation becomes simultaneously a symptom of colonial oppression and an element of principal resistance in the construction of post-colonial identity.

Keywords: Alienation, Socio-cognitive Approach, CDA, Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

Article Info: Received: 29 Jan 2026; Received in revised form: 26 Feb 2026; Accepted: 02 Mar 2026; Available online: 06 Mar 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.6