APPROACHING THE REPRESENTATION OF SUB-SAHARAN IMMIGRANTS IN A SAMPLE FROM THE SPANISH PRESS: DECONSTRUCTING STEREOTYPES

Approaching the representation of Sub-Saharan immigrants in a sample from the Spanish press: Deconstructing Stereotypes

Spain has become a country receiving immigrants in the last years. The majority of the items of news related to immigration that appear in the press exhibit negative characteristics.

The main purpose of this article is to observe the linguistic and visual representation of Sub-Saharan immigrants in a sample of the Spanish press in order to answer the following research questions: how are Sub-Saharan immigrants portrayed linguistically and visually in the given press?

What are the implications of the choices in language and images?

The researcher collected all the pieces of news related to Sub-Saharan immigrants in the three most popular Spanish newspapers, i.e., El País, ABC and El Mundo from 1 June 2011 to 31 December 2014. Visual grammar and critical discourse analysis (CDA) will be used in order to deconstruct the visual and linguistic representation of such immigrants. In addition, van Leeuwen’s (2008) classification of social actors will be used in the analysis.

The analysis demonstrates that the representation of Sub-Saharan immigrants displays the following characteristics: they are represented as vulnerable, lacking autonomy, as victims, etc. This representation does not contribute to the fact that the autochthonous population favours the integration of immigrants into the socio-economic structure, exercising the same rights as the Spanish population, and therefore that the dichotomy we-they is emphasized.

Bionote María Martínez Lirola is Professor of the Department of English at the University of Alicante, Spain and Research Fellow at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her main areas of research are Applied Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics. She has published more than 70 papers and seven books, such as Main Processes of Thematization and Postponement in English (Peter Lang, 2009). She has also presented papers in international congresses all over the world, and been a visiting scholar in different universities such as:

• Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD, 2015)
• University of Nottingham, Malaysia campus (2015)
• University of British Columbia and University of Montréal (2014)
• Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada, 2012)
• University of South Africa, UNISA (Pretoria, South Africa, 2012)
• University of Anahuac Mayad (Mérida, Mexico, 2008)
• University of Kwazulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 2006)
• Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia, 2005).

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