Representation: Manuel Alvarado - Ethnicity in Media

Stuart Hall is a person of interest here. He says that representations often focus on 'otherness', for example, emphasising difference or foreignness.

For example: Muslims being seen in the media as terrorists because of their differences to the western world.
These things change, for example back in the day people would more associate the Irish as terrorists and not just because of jokes about potatoes.
Because of these representations being very much real-life, they can often leak into fiction.

Manuel Alvarado's theory of representation of ethnicity in media (1987) has 4 main categories:
Dangerous - plays on the fear of otherness (e.g. terrorist, threatening immigrant, gang member.)
Exotic - plays on the appeal of otherness (e.g. wealthy foreign royalty, attractive jungle/desert 'native' etc)
Pitied, victim - partly because often the only time many foreign countries appear in our media is when they are suffering some disaster. May also play to our sense of superiority to the 'other'.
Humorous - encouraging us to laugh at representations of ethnicity. Earlier examples of this were often racist humour; more recent ones tend to present and subvert stereotypical representations of race and encourage us to recognise and laugh at stereotypes.

Examples:
Dangerous:


Exotic:


Pitied, victim:


Humorous (this is more a parody of Martial Arts movies but it was the best I could think of):

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