This paper tackles some analytical challenges of multimodal texts as they contribute to production of racial anxiety about asylum seekers. Building on a recent article in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics in which Michael Clyne1 discusses the lexical manifestations of increasing racial hatred towards refugees, the paper focuses on the ‘children overboard’ affair in Australian news. This affair was generated out of a false claim by Liberal Party ministers that asylum seekers threw their children overboard in an effort to coerce the Navy to offer them sanctuary. The story was front page news in October, 2001 and became a defining feature of the successful Coalition campaign for re-election in 2001 with long term effects on public discourse about refugees and border protection. The paper argues that applied linguists need ways of analysing the symbiosis of visual and verbal stories in media treatment of such issues. It presents key strategies of representation of boat people and their critics in in one exemplary news text in 2001 and the ways in which photograph and story helped to co-create the fiction. The paper investigates the complementary contribution of strategies of homogenisation, indetermination, essentialisation and negative role allocation in both image and verbiage and their combined effect on our interpretation of asylum seekers. Implications for applied linguistics of multimodal analysis of racist discourse are briefly canvassed.
(Eds.) (2000) Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the Design of Social Futures. Macmillan, Melbourne.
Chouliaraki, L.
(2000) National identities in late modernity: A case study of audience reception, In M. Reisigl & R. Wodak ( Eds.): The Semiotics of Racism: Approaches in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 305–330). Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
Hage, G.
(2003) On worrying: the lost art. of the well-administered national cuddle, Borderlands e-journal. 2. (1) 1–5.
Hall, S.
(1996) Gramsci’s relevance to the study of race and ethnicity, In D. Morley & K. H. Chen (Eds.) Dialogues in Cultural Studies (pp. 411–440). London: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K.
(1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. [2nd edition]. London: Edward Arnold.
Kress, G.
(2001) Sociolinguistics and social semiotics. In P. Cobley (Ed.) Semiotics and Linguistics ( pp. 66–82). London, Routledge.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T.
(1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London, Routledge.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T
(1998) Front pages: (The critical) analysis of newspaper layout. In A. Bell & P. Garrett (Eds.) Approaches to Media Discourse (pp. 186–219). Oxford United Kingdom: Blackwell.
Macken-Horarik, M.
( in press for 2003) Working the borders in racist discourse: the challenge of the ‘children overboard’ affair in news media texts, Social Semiotics, 13 (3).
Marr, D. & Wilkinson, M.
(2003) Dark Victory. Crows Nest: Australia, Allen & Unwin.
Mares, P.
(2002) (2nd edition). Borderline: Australia’s Response to Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Wake of the Tampa. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Parliament of Australia
(2002) Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee’s report into ‘A Certain Maritime Incident’. Web address for report: [URL]. Retrieved 28/2/2003.
O’Toole M.
(1994) The Language of Displayed Art. London: Leicester University Press.
Rizvi, F.
(1993) Children and the grammar of popular racism. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.) Race, Identity and Representation in Education (pp. 126 – 139). New York: Routledge.
Teo. P.
2000: Racism in the news: a critical discourse analysis of news reporting in two Australian newspapers”. Discourse & Society Vol. 11 ( 1): 7–49.
Unsworth, L.
(2001) Teaching Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice. Buckinham: Open University Press.
van Leeuwen, T.
(1996) The representation of social actors. In C. Caldas-Coulthard & M. Coulthard (Eds.) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 32–70). London: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, T.
(2000) Visual Racism. In M. Reisigl. & R. Wodak ( Eds.): The Semiotics of Racism: Approaches in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 305–330). Vienna: Passagen Verlag.
Weller, P.
(2002) Don’t Tell the Prime Minister. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.
Cited by (14)
Cited by 14 other publications
Yuan, Chuanyou, Yufei He & Yujie Liu
2021. Rule by law versus rule of law: A multimodal analysis of persuasion and legal ideologies in anti-corruption discourse in China. Multimodality & Society 1:4 ► pp. 429 ff.
Smith-Khan, Laura
2019. Communicative resources and credibility in public discourse on refugees. Language in Society 48:3 ► pp. 403 ff.
Smith-Khan, Laura
2019. Debating credibility. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 42:1 ► pp. 4 ff.
Smith-Khan, Laura
2023. Incorporating Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Australian Refugee Credibility Assessments: the Case of CRL18. Journal of International Migration and Integration 24:S4 ► pp. 727 ff.
Wijeyewardene, Ingrid
2019. Examining Agency in Thai Argumentative Political Science Texts. In Discourses of Southeast Asia [The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series, ], ► pp. 45 ff.
Lipovsky, Caroline
2016. Negotiating solidarity with potential donors: a study of the images in fundraising letters by not-for-profit organizations. Functional Linguistics 3:1
Unsworth, Len
2015. Persuasive narratives: evaluative images in picture books and animated movies. Visual Communication 14:1 ► pp. 73 ff.
Economou, Dorothy
2012. Standing out on Critical Issues: Evaluation in Large Verbal-visual Displays in Australian Broadsheets. In Multimodal Texts from Around the World, ► pp. 246 ff.
Knox, John S.
2009. Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper. Discourse & Communication 3:2 ► pp. 145 ff.
Unsworth, Len & Eveline Chan
2009. Bridging multimodal literacies and national assessment programs in literacy. The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 32:3 ► pp. 245 ff.
Knox, John
2007. Visual-verbal communication on online newspaper home pages. Visual Communication 6:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
2005. Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases. Applied Linguistics 26:4 ► pp. 503 ff.
Eades, Diana & Jacques Arends
2004. Using language analysis in the determination of national origin of asylum seekers: an introduction. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 11:2 ► pp. 179 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.