Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
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Charlton D Mcilwain
His research interests include race and political communication. His publications include
Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (2003); ‘Time, timing, and being on time: The play of race and ideology in the postmodern political organization’ (2004);When Death Goes Pop: Death, Media and the Remaking of Community (2005); and ‘Minority candidates, media framing, and racial cues in the 2004 election’ (with S. M. Caliendo, 2006).
Abstract
This paper analyzes a televised political advertisement run by David Perryman against former Congressman J. C. Watts in the 1994 Fourth District Congressional race in Oklahoma. Relying on Roland Barthes' conception of the rhetoric of the image — what I refer to as critical semiotics — the paper investigates the four sign systems at work in the ad: photographs, written language, spoken language (narration), and moving images. The analysis demonstrates: how the sponsor of the ad uses the trope of the ‘Afro’ as the primary signifying image; that the ad argues against Watts' candidacy by implicitly appealing to audience members' (voters') negative associations of blackness with inferiority, criminality, and perceptions of black militancy associated with the black power movement.
About the author
His research interests include race and political communication. His publications include Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (2003); ‘Time, timing, and being on time: The play of race and ideology in the postmodern political organization’ (2004); When Death Goes Pop: Death, Media and the Remaking of Community (2005); and ‘Minority candidates, media framing, and racial cues in the 2004 election’ (with S. M. Caliendo, 2006).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
