PICTURING AFRICA: THE FIGURATIVE FRAMING OF THE CONTINENT IN ONLINE NEWS

Abstract

The representation of Africa in Western media has usually been considered as highly stereotypical, unified and predominantly negative. Even though recent findings indicate a shift toward a changing narrative, certain frames and themes, such as violence, appear to be stable and stagnant over time. It has also been attested that figurative language types like metaphor and metonymy play an important role in shaping public discourse. Visuals contribute to this process by highlighting certain aspects of the news coverage, thereby shaping our intercultural knowledge. Despite the rise of visuality and visual studies, it appears that the continent’s representation conveyed through visual means is a less researched area. Filling this paucity, this paper examines the visual metonymic relationships of violent news about Africa. A multimodal analysis is conducted to analyse the metonymical framing used by BBC Africa (www.bbc.com/news/world/africa) and CNN Africa (www.edition.cnn.com/africa) as seen in the headlines and featured images of the sampled articles in the 2010s. Since violence is a complex act, the analysis builds on the action and complex event frames. The results shed light on the substitutions through which news portals provide an interpretive framework for their readers to make sense of such complex events. On the one hand, the research highlights the importance of further inquiry into the role of visuals in news framing, while on the other hand, it hopes to contribute to the advancement of the hitherto little researched area of visual metonymies and provide an analytical framework that can be used to examine the media representation of any specific act of violence.