Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
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Fredrick Ogenga
Fredrick Ogenga (b. 1978) is a lecturer at Rongo University College 〈braco_od@yahoo.com〉. His research interests include critical political-economy of the media, postmodernism, media and nationalism, and international communication. His publications include “Mugabe must go: The South African press representation of the Zimbabwean crisis” (2011); “Is peace journalism possible in the war against terror? TheDaily Nation and the standard representation of Operation Linda Nchi in Somalia” (2012); “Fast-track progam, electoral land-grab or local South African Press expressing fears of a Zimbabwe in South Africa? The representation of Zimbabwe's economic crisis, 2000–2008” (2012); and “TheDaily Nation coverage of the Hague trials and the construction of peace discourses in Kenya” (2013).
Abstract
This paper argues that America and Britain have succeeded in globe-cultural domination through visual semiotics and commoditization inherent in their music videos. The paper argues that Anglo-American music, often in different genres, has virtually penetrated different parts of the globe where it has been appropriated to suit the local context. However, the visual semiotics represented through their music videos reveal how they have succeeded as the de-facto authoritative authors of dominant discourses replicated elsewhere. The most visible aspect of this power play is represented in the symbolic and occasional explicit display of the American and the British flag in many of their music videos and the flashing of the “green back” – US dollar. The lyrical content celebrates the “successes” of global materialism and cultural neo-liberalism as championed by the two nations. The paper uses critical political-economy theories of the media in the context of cultural studies. It further uses semiotics as a methodology to critically deconstruct the meanings behind Maroon 5's “Like Jagger” music video from a Kenyan perspective.
About the author
Fredrick Ogenga (b. 1978) is a lecturer at Rongo University College 〈braco_od@yahoo.com〉. His research interests include critical political-economy of the media, postmodernism, media and nationalism, and international communication. His publications include “Mugabe must go: The South African press representation of the Zimbabwean crisis” (2011); “Is peace journalism possible in the war against terror? The Daily Nation and the standard representation of Operation Linda Nchi in Somalia” (2012); “Fast-track progam, electoral land-grab or local South African Press expressing fears of a Zimbabwe in South Africa? The representation of Zimbabwe's economic crisis, 2000–2008” (2012); and “The Daily Nation coverage of the Hague trials and the construction of peace discourses in Kenya” (2013).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
