Week 4: Notes on The Spectacle of the Other
Notes on The Spectacle of the Other (Chapter 4) The image both shows an event (denotation) and carries a ‘message’ or meaning (connotation) - Barthes would call it a ‘meta-message’ or myth about ‘race’, colour and ‘otherness’. We can’t help reading images of this kind as ‘saying something’, not just about the people or the occasion, but about their ‘otherness’, their ‘difference’. ‘Difference’ has been marked. How it is then interpreted is a constant and recurring preoccupation in the representation of people who are racially and ethnically different from the majority population. Difference signifies. It ‘speaks’ (229, 230). Images do not carry meaning or ‘signify’ on their own. They accumulate meanings, or play off their meanings against one another, across a variety of broader level of how ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ is being represented in a particular culture at an one moment, we can see similar representational practices and figures being repeated, with vari...
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