Abstract

FREITAS, Gustavo  and  PEIXINHO, Ana Teresa. The Colonial War in Media Narratives: How Portuguese and Angolan Newspapers Recounted an Event 60 Years Later. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2022, vol.41, pp.75-89.  Epub June 22, 2022. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.41(2022).3666.

March 15, 2021, marked the 60th anniversary of the Angolan insurgency that started the Colonial War. The date rekindled the memory of an intersectional milestone between the histories of Portugal and Angola, and, for having gained space in the mainstream news media, it was opportune to analyse the media narratives that recounted the conflict. The episode, in 1961, was motivated by a series of factors, with the native peoples’ dissatisfaction with the exploitation regime standing out. For this research, inscribed in the field of postcolonial narratology, it is important to understand how Portuguese and Angolan newspapers reported this event. To this end, a qualitative methodology - critical discourse analysis - was used, and journalistic texts about the event in question published in the newspapers Público and Jornal de Angola were analysed in an exploratory way. This paper aims to understand the ideological differences between the approach of each of the media productions, pointing out matches and mismatches, and identify the discursive strategies that shaped such contemporary media narratives about colonial conflicts. One of the conclusions is the perception that the Angolan newspaper sewed its narrative from an internal perspective of colonialism, addressing the events from the accounts of people who experienced them. Meanwhile, the Portuguese newspaper was guided by the already postcolonial relations emerging with the increasing globalisation.

Keywords : representation strategies; postcolonial narratology; discourse-historical approach; media narratives; Colonial War.

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