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.
