Mahmoud Torabi Aghdam; Ali Asghar Fahimifar; Shahab Esfandyari; AmirHasan Nedai
Abstract
Representing racial, ethnic, cultural, and geographical “Others” is considered a focal strategy of a number of American media and entertainment productions. Accordingly, the primary goal of this article is to explain the “Othering” mechanisms in the first three seasons of the ...
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Representing racial, ethnic, cultural, and geographical “Others” is considered a focal strategy of a number of American media and entertainment productions. Accordingly, the primary goal of this article is to explain the “Othering” mechanisms in the first three seasons of the popular television series Westworld (2016–present), with a focus on the values of the American Dream. In its theoretical literature and analyses, the study drew on the Western philosophical concept of “the Other” and on cultural studies. To understand how the construct of the Others functions in the show, the study used John Fiske’s semiotics and three-level model, along with Roland Barthes’ Symbolic Code. The research found that the presence and absence of two American Other groups—Black and Native Americans—and one non-American Other group—East Asian people—in relation to white people, i.e., “the Self,” in the series carry significant implications. Westworld’s semiotic mechanisms represent white people as the dominant group, East Asian people and Native Americans as subaltern groups, and Black people as being close to whites. By doing so, they normalize a power hierarchy topped by the white race to reproduce for a future world the myth of the “superior white;” a myth that portrays the core elements of the American Dream, including individualism, liberty, and freedom of choice, as being exclusive to white people. The myth also downgrades the essential element of equality by stereotyping and delegitimizing the Others to ensure that whites will be the only group to develop plans and make decisions for the world of the future.
mahmoud torabi aghdam; Abdullah Bichranloo
Abstract
The representation of ethnic and racial topics is one of the categories that focus on cultural studies. This paper aims to explain Hollywood’s approaches to the representation of the black minority during Obama’s presidency. To this end, purposive sampling was employed to select 21 prominent ...
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The representation of ethnic and racial topics is one of the categories that focus on cultural studies. This paper aims to explain Hollywood’s approaches to the representation of the black minority during Obama’s presidency. To this end, purposive sampling was employed to select 21 prominent movies about black people from 2009 to 2017 in two stages. They were then studied using a combination of two semiotics models. According to the findings, the illustration of black people in that period included the following categories: 1) critical surveying of history (14 movies); 2) advancing black people’s demands assisted by the white people (10 movies); 3) defeat of black people without any help from the white people (2 movies); 4) black people’s revenge of the white people (2 movies); 5) social realism (7 movies); 6) analysis of problems in the contemporary black community (5 movies); and 7) normalization of black lives besides white lives (2 movies). Overall, the redefinition of black-and-white relations and conflicts in the foregoing categories reflects the consistency between Hollywood and black people’s egalitarian process inspired by the new political opportunity. Although we now witness the denaturalization of traditional stereotypes in the illustration of black people, the semiotics systems of most movies refer to the presence of other views and modern stereotypes.
