Right or Wrong? An Image for Immigrants: An Interpersonal Multimodal Discourse Analysis of MIA’s Music Video “Paper Planes”

Abstract

Most of the time, the opinion that people have regarding immigrants is based on what media, press, and news offer to the public. The music video “Paper Planes” by MIA demonstrates some of the stereotypes that society has for people according to their identity, and the singer represents it with the most outstanding characteristics of the minority groups in America. To conduct a more in-depth analysis of the music video and lyrics of MIA, I will provide an interpersonal multimodal discourse analysis. The analysis is based on the theories proposed by Halliday (1978) on systemic functional linguistics and Machin (2010) for the visual semiotic framework. The results demonstrate how the discourse used in the song transmits the perspectives people create regarding immigrants and perpetuate them.