Theory Project- research

 Gilroy- theories about ethnicity and post-colonialism

OCR definition: 

-The African diaspora caused by the slave trade has now constructed a transatlantic culture that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean and British – the ‘Black Atlantic’. 

-Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating ‘postcolonial melancholia’, an attachment to an airbrushed version of British colonial history, which expresses itself in criminalising immigrants and an ‘us and them’ approach to the world founded on the belief in the inherent superiority of white western civilisation. 

Context: 

During 1500’s to the 1900’s there was a period of colonialism: 

Colonialism- taking over another country to run and exploit it 

-Britain did this a lot of countries such as India, Caribbean, and parts of Africa by sailing and installing their own military, soldiers and government to act as though they owned that country, leading the people to obey the British. This was done in a way to increase the British empire and to make Britain more powerful 

-So Gilroy believes that this period of colonialization has had a massive knock-on effect in our media today and you can still see people from ethnic minorities and the countries we colonialised as being shown as “others”, dehumanized and marginalized- they aren't seen as successful or powerful as white, British communities 

Example:

Beginning of Water aid in 2016 we see a British radio with a British accent and it is very obvious that this is supposed to be somewhere in middle to upper class Britain who clearly have an abundance of water because of the rainy weather outside then it cuts to the scene of a African country where its very dry where people don’t have access to water in their everyday lives where the narrator tells us to donate money to help water access- Gilroy says this advert has evidence of post-colonialist ideas because we are showing Britain and British people as being more successful and having the power to save people in African countries who are powerless 

Stuart Hall- Reception theory

Reception theory as developed by Stuart Hall asserts that media texts are encoded and decoded. The producer encodes messages and values into their media which are then decoded by the audience: 

The audience receives the creative work done and perceives to its content in either similar or different. The meaning of the message can change in the way they see it fit according to their social context. 

-Stuart Hall believes that media products are encoded with ideas by the producers that make them so when you produce a film etc the producer puts in certain ideas that film that they want a particular message to come across and they do that by creating a particular stories or characters and hope that the audience understands that message by decoding and taking away what is intended by the producers so that there is a preferred reading of the media text 

-Preferred reading means the particular messages received by the audience are accpeted and the audience totally agrees on what the producer wanted them to understand- if an audience in the 1950’s were looking at a ‘Tide’ advert the preferred reading would be that the producer intended was that as a woman you should want to keep familys clothes nice and clean and that you shoould absolutley buy tide as it’s the best product out there. 

-Some audiences develop an oppositional reading were they interpret that media product and they don’t take on board the messages that the producers wanted them to understand, so people may have seen the tide advert in the 1950’s as they totally disagree with it and think its really sexist that women arent the only ones that do laundry, and thus feel quite offended  

-A negotiated reading is a mixture of both preferred and oppositional reading to where an audience member understands the messages and they accept some of the messages but we reject other parts- an audience member might see the tied advert and think they understand the messages and that tied is a good product but they don’t really want to buy the product that’s just aimed at women 

-Audiences might read texts in different ways for different reasons: 

Different genders 

Different ages 

Historical time periods 

Location 

Backgrounds and ethnicities 

Baudrillard Post modernism 

-The idea that in postmodern culture the boundaries between the ‘real world’ and the world of media have collapsed and that it Is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and simulation 

-The idea that in postmodern age in simulacra we are immersed in a world of images which no longer refer to anything ‘real’ 

-The idea that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent (hyperreality) - Dinseyland castle vs normal castle

-The lines between created texts and reality are becoming blurred – perfect Instagram images seem ‘real’ even though they probably arent.