A critical analysis of colonial and postcolonial discourses and representations of the people of Mozambique in the Portuguese newspaper ‘O Século de Joanesburgo’ from 1970-1980

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to probe how Mozambican people were represented or constructed in the colonial and post-colonial periods through the columns of the Portuguese newspaper, ‘O Século de Joanesburgo’. The study examines a corpus of 58, 070 tokens (consisting of 100 articles, 50 for colonial and 50 for postcolonial periods), which were systematically selected from the political, sport, letters to the reader and editorial domains published from 1970 to 1980. The analytical framework for this study is threefold. It is informed by corpus linguistics (CL) as described by, amongst others, McEnery and Wilson (1996/2001) and Bennett (2010); critical discourse analysis (CDA), in particular the work of Van Dijk (1996; 2003), Wodak (1995; 2011) and Wodak and Meyer (2009) and multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) as used by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996; 1998; 2006), Kress (2010) and Machin and Mayr (2012)