Sanja Škifić, Rajko Petković ACTA LINGUISTICA 106 INTERTEXTUAL SYMBOLISM, GULLAH AND LANGUAGE CONFLICT IN DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST Sanja Škifić English Department, University of Zadar, Croatia Rajko Petković English Department, University of Zadar, Croatia Summary: The paper focuses on the analysis of the African-American film Daughters of the Dust. Due to the film’s geographical setting, narrative tech- niques, feminist perspective and immersion in the postcolonial context, it is possible to analyze it in the context of intertextuality and in correlation with other important films and novels. The technique of juxtaposing the past and the present is emphasized as means of depicting the importance of commu- nal memories. From a linguistic point of view, the film Daughters of the Dust represents an ideal site for investigating the characteristics of Gullah Creole as a product of contact between English and West African languages. Such linguistic contact represents a part of a broader cultural contact within which it is possible to identify language conflict and language ideology, notions which emerge in the analysis of efforts to maintain the cultural and linguistic identity of Gullah speakers. Keywords: Daughters of the Dust, intertextual symbolism, communal memo- ries, Gullah Creole, language conflict, language ideology 1. Introduction Daughters of the Dust is an independent African-American film made in 1991. It was the first feature made by an African-American woman to receive a wide- spread theatrical distribution. Featuring a non-linear storytelling and a frag- mented narrative line, the film had difficulties in finding a distributor, although it won the Sundance prize for cinematography. It was finally distributed by Kino International, a New York company, and eventually achieved a notable success. Mostly seen by a middle-class black female audience, the film's suc- cess surprised even Donald Krim, the company's president: «its appeal is wider than we thought. It's going to do over a million at the box office, which puts it in an elite category. Maybe a dozen art films a year reach that goal... It will hit more than a hundred markets before we're finished» (quoted in [Brouwer 1995: 13]). Daughters of the Dust belongs to several very different subcategories of modern American independent film. At the same time it is an African-American film, a film made by a woman director and a film made outside the usual Los Angeles – New York film axis, belonging to a small category of regional films and featuring diverse, often non-urban settings. Modern African-American cinema has developed alongside two very dif- ferent concepts. The first of them refers to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, which celebrated the rebellious and sexual nature of their main protagonists, but