"Do you want to help them" Analyzing the representation of African Americans in Expressen's news reports of 53 youths from Chicago visiting Stockholm in 1966

• Main Author: Allen, Keenan
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS) 2019
• Subjects: Representation; African Americans; Swedes; Stereotype; Discourse; Social Sciences; Samhällsvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21283

This study is a qualitative content analysis, aiming to analyze the representation of African Americans in reports made by the Swedish newspaper Expressen, covering a journey with 53 youths from Chicago to Stockholm in 1966. This study has a critical approach to understanding how preferred meanings were reproduced in Expressen’s representation of the African American participants. Stuart Hall’s (2003) theory ‘the spectacle of the other’ and Homi Bhabha’s (1994) theory stemming from colonial discourse, ‘the process of subjectification’ are used to analyze the material. The material collected consists of text and images presented by Expressen which was an active reporter on the event, as well considered a co-partner of the project to travel from Chicago to Stockholm. This paper suggests the way in which the African Americans were represented is part of the representational practices of ‘racializing the othering’, significantly through the form known as stereotyping; which results in a clear distinction between them and Swedes on the basis of racial representations produced about the African Americans. The study is a modest contribution to expanding and developing the concept of how different races has been represented and perpetual to the history of differentiating people through racial and colonial discourse.