A Comparative Study of Brazilian and British Images of the Black Body

Abstract

Using multimodal approaches to meaning representation in multimodal texts (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; O’Toole, 1994; van Leeuwen, 2000, 2008), this chapter analyses two front covers of the Brazilian magazine Raça Brasil and two ads from the British EMMA Awards. It takes into account Brazilian research on race relations and representations which have been carried out in the area of applied linguistics, more specifically within critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, and social theory (Caetano, 2007; Costa, 2006; Magalhaes, 2004, 2006; Nascimento, 2003; Pinheiro, 2007, among others). These studies examine media texts - online newspaper texts and magazine front covers - in order to unravel the discourses at hand in the wider context of Brazilian representations of race identities. One of the dominant discourses in the Brazilian public sphere of media texts is the discourse of racial democracy, with the aestheticisation of Black identities as a result of a colour categorisation which emphasises the beauty of miscegenated identities, the social equality of different-coloured people, and a Brazilian, apparently monocultural, identity. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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