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?