Transcript How are black people represented in the media?

How are black people
represented in the media?
Learning Objectives
To understand how and why black people
are represented within the media the way
they are.
To be able to identify and understand
theorists views on this area.
Home Work Feedback
What are your 4 roles?
How and why do you think these roles
came about?
Home Work
Begin research of different media
representations of black culture. Begin
looking up additional information on the
theorists analysed today. Make some
notes about what you find in your books.
Task
Analyse the following images, what type of
representation do you see?
Write as many words or sentences as you
can think of for each.
What do you see?
bell hooks
 The colour codes: Lighter skinned women
are considered more desirable and fit
better into the western ideology of beauty.
 Black women are objectified and
sexualised in hip-hop reflecting the
colonialist view of black women (sexually
disposable). This is also true in film.
 Commodified blackness, a mediated view
of black culture that is considered the
norm.
Stuart Hall
 The media and therefore audiences often blur
race and class. Often associating particular
races with a particular class.
 Audience reception theory; audiences
read/understand a particular text according to
their cultural upbringing.
 Western (white dominated) cultures.
Continue to misinterpret ethnic minorities in
the media due to underlying racist
tendencies. Ethnic minorities are often
represented as ‘the other’.
Stuart Hall
Believes there are three different roles that
film and TV have previously put black
people into.
Some of these roles still apply today.
Can you find the different roles in the
reading I handed you?
Highlight them and write them down in your
books. Think of 1 or 2 contemporary roles that
would fit within that representation.
Paul Gilroy
 Black music articulated diasporic
experiences of resistance to white
capitalist culture.
 Employs the notion of ‘diaspora’ and how
ethnic minorities (particularly black people)
experience dislocation from their
homeland. E.g. feeling as if you do not
totally belong in Britain but you also are
considered ‘English’ in the Caribbean,
Africa or Asia etc
Michel Foucault
 'Archaeology' is the term Foucault used during
the 1960s to describe his approach to writing
history.
 Archaeology is about examining the discursive
traces and orders left by the past in order to
write a 'history of the present'.
 Archaeology is about looking at history as a way
of understanding the processes that have led to
what we are today.
 Therefore when analyzing your contemporary
case studies you take into account those past
representations and how they have contributed
to what we have today.
Apply theory to images
How would we apply the ideas of bell
hooks, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and
Michael Foucault to the images we’ve
analysed?
What have we learned?
 Name one of the theorists discussed today and
one element of their theory.
 Which theorist believes that black people fit into
three specific roles in film and TV?
 Who’s theory would the image of Beyonce fit
into?
 What type of representation is the 50 Cent
image?
 What was your first impression of the Trident
campaign image?