Representations of Blackness in the Colombian Press: An Intersectional Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

On August 7, 2022, Afro-descendant activist and politician Francia Márquez assumes the position of Vice President of Colombia. This event triggers a new proliferation of discourses on Blackness in the Colombian press and the Colombian public sphere in general. However, the notion of Blackness as a discursive construction in Colombia is complex and often ambiguous due to the term's genealogy in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, and the changing nature of each discourse (Wodak 2008: 6).

Our study analyzes and describes the main discursive patterns through which Blackness is constructed and represented in a selection of Colombian journalistic texts to achieve a critical assessment of certain recurring interpretative repertoires (Potter and Wetherell 1987) that may contribute to the diffusion of hegemonic ideologies. To do this, we designed a corpus of Colombian journalistic articles from both mainstream and popular sources in a time frame shortly before and after the 2022 presidential elections. By reconstructing different discursive strategies around keywords such as Negritud, negro, or afrodescendiente, we aim to reveal the dominant narratives surrounding them as well as their main social actors. Among them, the category woman (mujer) stands out in the corpus, leading us to understand that, for a description of representations of Blackness in the corpus discourses, it is necessary to analyze the identified categories from an intersectional perspective.