scholarly journals Black America: Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Childish Gambino’s “This is America”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 190
Author(s):  
Mona Audryn Margaretha ◽  
Yasmine Anabel Panjaitan

A song can manifest itself as a critical instrument in the vast socio-political atmosphere. Often times a song conceals its real meaning within layers of linguistic elements and through visual communication. Upon the release of Childish Gambino’s This is America (2018), the music video has been assumed widely assumed to contain semiotic elements that criticize the injustice politics of race in America. To dig deeper into this assertion, we use Machin’s Lyrics Analysis (2010) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar approach (2006) to analyze the illustrated semiotic elements. Both frameworks are two Multimodal Discourse Analysis approaches that explore interdisciplinary analysis in the discourse-oriented research. This article finds that Gambino does question the practice of black discrimination through gun and police violence in present America by utilizing distant words and excessive gestures in his visual communication as a diversion. They are purposefully placed to gain a profound observation from the audience, and thus able to spark a conversation regarding the issue in a greater scale. Furthermore, it is found that This is America applies comical aspects in the visual elements as a layering device. Through humorous semiotic elements, Gambino is discovered to highlight the commodification of black art in his music video.

Author(s):  
Ari Nur Widiyanto ◽  
Sigit Ricahyono

<p>Dagadu Djokja is one of the icons Yogyakarta which provides various souvenirs typical of Yogyakarta such as t-shirts, batik, handicrafts and others. One product that is in demand by tourists is the shirt, because the shirt Dagadu has unique characteristics that are of cultural value delivered. In this study will analyze Dagadu products in terms of verbal and visual elements as well as explore the culture found on the shirt Dagadu.The approach of this study is descriptive qualitative. The type of this study is document research. The data of this research takes from <a href="http://www.Dagadu.co.id">www.Dagadu.co.id</a>. In this study, the researcher uses the Systemic Functional Grammar to analyse the verbal elements, the Generic Structure Potential to analyse the visual elements and the Iceberg Model to analyse the culture reflected in dagadu product.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-66
Author(s):  
Rosy Michelle Peña Chan

Most of the time, the opinion that people have regarding immigrants is based on what media, press, and news offer to the public. The music video “Paper Planes” by MIA demonstrates some of the stereotypes that society has for people according to their identity, and the singer represents it with the most outstanding characteristics of the minority groups in America. To conduct a more in-depth analysis of the music video and lyrics of MIA, I will provide an interpersonal multimodal discourse analysis. The analysis is based on the theories proposed by Halliday (1978) on systemic functional linguistics and Machin (2010) for the visual semiotic framework. The results demonstrate how the discourse used in the song transmits the perspectives people create regarding immigrants and perpetuate them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Fabiola Martínez Guerrero

Feminism has become part of the pop music discourse in recent years. Through M.I.A’s “Bad Girls” video, not only the image of empowered, independent, rebel women are portrayed, but also the celebration of culture and the relationship between women and men in an environment of equity is suggested. In order to propose an analysis and interpretation of “Bad Girls” video and song lyrics, a multimodal discourse analysis (Machin, 2010) is followed, as well as Halliday’s systematic functional linguistics framework. The findings from this analysis suggest a discourse of feminism and empowerment, but also inclusion and acceptance regardless of race, religion or gender.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Marino

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the process of reconstruction of Māori postcolonial cultural identity in the twenty-first century which also passes through the reclamation and redefinition of ‘takatāpui’ notion. ‘Takatāpui’ is an umbrella term that nowadays indicates all the Māori with non-conforming wairua (spiritualities, gender identities), sexualities and sex characteristics. It is a culturally specific word which represents a form of intersectionality by identifying people as both Māori and queer.As a consequence of the increasing spread of the Internet, which has become a virtual place to construe identity and to promote the dissemination of ideas, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis is conducted on a corpus comprising 10 audiovisual texts fully retrieved from the web and exclusively produced by Māori takatāpui activists and/or containing Māori takatāpui activists’ self-narratives or claims.The corpus is analysed by applying a MMDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis) framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic framework (2006). The analysis is conducted also by taking into account Blommaert’s linguistic and ethnographic framework (2014).The findings of the analysis show the different strategies through which Māori identities are construed and conveyed reinforcing what the Māori scholar, Tuhiwai Smith (1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed Books Limited, 28), calls “a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmenting and dying”.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110032
Author(s):  
Beatriz Carbajal-Carrera

Heroic narratives are often biased towards a conceptualization of the rural/urban difference that positions rural identities at the margins. In particular, superhero stories have traditionally offered a vision of heroism assumed to be male, urban and young. How can post-rural contexts shaped by migration contest these narrative patterns? This article examines the street narrative of Fenómenas do rural, which recognizes older female rural identities and casts them as superheroines. Through a multimodal discourse analysis, I examine its contestation of heroic patterns, its recognition of older female rural identities and its creation of affiliation opportunities for the Galician community. I argue that this narrative stands as a reflection of the rurban (rural + urban) and the glocal (global + local) elements that subverts pre-existing canons in the superhero and the meiga (‘witch’) mythology imaginaries.


Author(s):  
Shuting Cao ◽  
Rui Chen ◽  
Haiyuan Liu ◽  
Ruolin Shi

The main goal of college English education is to cultivate the students’ language ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and to promote the formation of individualized learning and autonomous ability of college students. At present, the new curriculum reform in our country has put forward a new educational requirement to college English teaching, which requires the innovation of college English teaching idea, and under the background of the development of new media, it proposes to use new media equipment to carry out teaching activities. However, college English education in our country is influenced by examination-oriented education mode, and the traditional education method is still used, which is not good for college students to improve their comprehensive quality of English. In view of this development situation, the Ministry of Education of China Based on the development of new media, a multimodal discourse analysis approach to college English education is proposed to enhance the level of College English teaching.


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