The Battle Cry of Resistance Against Inequality and Injustice: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This paper used the three-dimensional discursive analysis of Fairclough as a premise on the political and power ideologies involved in the images and the visual grammar of Kress and Leeuwen to unveil the representational, interactive, and compositional choices undertaken to disseminate the notion of resistance against racial inequality and injustice through the interaction of multimodality and resemiotization. It sought to identify the visual meta-functions and sub-meta-functions in the selected images of anti-racist/-injustice rallies and which of these (sub-)meta-functions re-semiotize the anti-racial movement, Black Lives Matter, into its basic elements, namely, Black Men/Women/Futures Matter or other movements. It also attempted to document how social practices are disseminated and redefined using visual grammar features in the selected images. Three out of thirty-seven chosen news images from CNN world news coverage, ordered vertically, were discussed in the paper. Results showed that the images confirm the presence of four processes: action (highest), symbolic, reactional, and speech (lowest). It also illustrated that the hegemony of political symbolic representations is strengthened or recontextualized through religious, social (gender issues-LGBT), and ethnic (Australian aboriginal groups) orientations. Lastly, the images showed that the socio-anti-racist practice is legitimized through purging the racially discriminative symbolisms (Iconoclasm) of dominant ideology by an eligible participant. The study concluded that although the representational structures (action, reactional, and symbolic processes), interactive patterns, and compositional systems appeared to be utilized somewhat equally, the micro-meta-function subcategories (contact, vertical/horizontal angles, modality, informational value, and salience) were distinguishing factors in meaning making and resemiotization among the selected news images.