Suchergebnisse

This article examines the discrepancy in western media portrayals of Brown and Black migrants and Ukrainian refugees by using critical discourse analysis and representation (visual analysis). For many decades, western media coverage of the ongoing irregular migration to Europe, the United States and Australia has been characterized by racial bias against coloured migrants and refugees, regularly framing them either as criminals, swarms of insects, or a danger to western values and 'way of life'. This hostile and dehumanizing discourse was not applied to Ukrainians forced to flee from Russia's invasion of their country. On the contrary, Ukrainians have been embraced with open arms in Europe because, as many officials indicated, they are white and civilized Europeans. Within this racialized context, the article juxtaposes the media's dehumanization of coloured migrants with portrayals of victimized Ukrainians and critically examines the framing of coloured migrants as imposters and unfit parents. The findings confirm that western attitude and policies towards immigration and responses to refugees' plights are strictly based on race and religion. Used as registers of difference, they are often deployed to criminalize, punish and frame Brown migrants as shifting threats to western citizens, their stability, racial fabric or civilization.

The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments' oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians and filmmakers have skillfully used moving images to critique and expose colonial transgressions. In their efforts to reimagine the horrors of violent encounters between the French army and Algerian guerilla fighters, their narratives cover daring eye-witness accounts of war crimes, including acts of torture at times described by the perpetrators themselves while catering to the expectations of a global audience. Florent Emilio Siri's L'ennemi intime (2007) and David Oelhoffen's Far from Men (2014) are among these transnational productions that accomplish both tasks. In the stories told by the two films, the plots show evidence of a fundamental thematic transformation in filmic representations that collapses the differences between colonizer and colonized, situating both as victims of colonization. The article argues that even though both films consistently reproduce the conventional portrait of the colonized as weak, passive, and deeply reliant on French guidance, Far from Men introduces the myth of the vanishing native, a theme that helps legitimize and normalize the settler's "right" to occupy the colonized space.