Imaging Africa in Korean mass media : analytical approach of documentary analysis <Tears of Africa>

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Imaging Africa in Korean Mass media : Analytical approach of documentary analysis <Tears of Africa>

As the relation between Korea and Africa grew stronger and deeper in recent years, it has become necessary to study African images among the public and establish a proper knowledge on Africa. However, like many people do, the Korean public also has negative stereotypes of Africa.
The responses from the public to the question "What comes to your mind when you hear the word 'Africa'?" is mostly full of naïve and archaic ideas. A survey conducted by this study indicates that respondents, regardless of their age and sex, tended to explain the images of Africa using archaic and biased expressions.
This study is aimed at exploring into why the Korean public in general would have negative and distorted images of Africa. This is, probably, because of the high impact of the media, especially TV programs that reproduce negative images of Africa. With this hypothesis, this study checks whether this assumption is right or not by doing a random survey. From this survey, it was found that most of the information about Africa obtained by the public comes from the media, particularly TV programs. Therefore, this study has selected to analyze one of the popular TV programs in Korea known as <Tears of Africa> broadcasted by the Korean broadcasting company, MBC, and tried to find out which images have reproduced and represented Africa as ‘undeveloped’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘primordial’ and ‘unchanged’.
The conclusion of this study points out that, first, there is no unique perspective on Africa in Korea. Rather, it seems that the Korean media have followed and even perpetuated the images which have been produced by the western media alone that Africa is the origin of human being; Africa is a poverty-ridden continent; African tribes still live in a primitive life and so on. Second, the public have been exposed to these images without any critical reviews. At some point, this is because of the inability of the Korean media to produce their own viewpoint about Africa. Therefore, it is plausible to say that Korean media have just followed the Western ‘Orientalism’, which conceptualizes Africa as ‘Others’ by highlighting the ‘tribal’ and ‘traditional’ aspects of Africa.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. Introduction 1
• 1. Background of thesis 1
• 2. Aim of thesis 5
• 3. Outline of thesis 7
• II. Literature Review 8
• III. Methodology 16
• 1. Quantitative methodology: Survey method 17
• 2. Qualitative methodology: Media content analysis 21
• IV. The images of Africa in Korean media 27
• 1. History of Korean documentaries about Africa since 1980s 27
• 2. Korean documentaries about Africa in the Twenty-first Century 30
• V. Random survey and the analysis of <Tears of Africa> 34
• 1. The random survey 34
• 2. Description of <Tears of Africa> 40
• 3. Media content analysis 53
• 1) Narrative analysis 53
• 2) Symbolic analysis 61
• 3) The relevance of <Tears of Africa> and random survey 77
• VI. Conclusion 81
• References 94