The Spectacle of the 'Other' - Chapter 4

• The theme of representing difference - especially racial and ethnic difference.
• Represented as hero and villain at the same time.
• Many potential meanings of an image - privilege one.
• Caption anchors the meaning with words.
• Meaning lies in the conjunction of the image and text.
• Image shows event and message - meta-message.
• Hard to read images of black athletes without getting messages about race.
• Intertextuality - accumulation of meanings across different texts, where one image refers to another or has its meaning altered by being 'read in the context of other images.
• Difference is essential to meaning.
• Binary oppositions are a crude and reductionist way of establishing meaning - fee neutral binary oppositions.
• Meaning is established through dialogue - Bakhtin.
• Culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system.
• Difference is ambivalent - can be both positive and negative.
• Racialised discourse is structured by a set of binary oppositions.
• The racial theory applies the culture/nature distinction differently to the two racialised groups.
• Signifying is a well-established part of the black vernacular literary tradition.
• Naturalization - representational strategy designed to fix 'difference' and secure it forever. 
• For blacks, culture and nature became interchangeable.
• Stereotyped - reduced to a few essentials, fixed in nature by a few simplified characteristics.
• Black cartoons - thick lips, fuzzy hair, broad face and nose, etc. 
• D.W. Griffiths - 'The birth of a Nation' (1915) - birth of cinema, introduced black stereotyped into cinema.
• Without the use of 'types', it would be difficult to make sense of the world - essential to the production of meaning.
• "A type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily-grasped and widely recognised characterisation in which fee traits are foregrounded and change or development is kept to a minimum."
• Stereotyping reduces, essentialises, naturalizes and fixes difference and deploys a strategy of 'splitting' - divides the normal and acceptable from the abnormal and unacceptable. 
• Stereotypes are more rigid than types.
• Stereotyping tends to occur where there are gross inequalities of power - symbolic power.
• A discourse produces a form of racialised knowledge of the other deeply implicated operations of power.
• Infantilisation can be a way of symbolically 'castrating' the black man - slave, deprived of responsibilities.