Description
Legacies of British imperialism, expressed through news content and coverage, represent a barrier to alternative political imaginaries and democratic possibilities. Digital and non-digital media work together in a hybrid system in which political news from professional news organisations dominates the UK media landscape (Chadwick and Vaccari, 2019). This system constructs and interpellates 'the British Subject’. That imaginary is defined in and through an idealised and sanitised vision of the British Empire. This imperialist understanding of ‘Britishness’ was used to dismiss, silence and demonise Jeremy Corbyn, during his time as Labour Party leader. This paper presents a selection of my research using a multimodal discourse analysis of its articulation during his four-year leadership. Analysing the visual dimension of meaning-making helps to better reveal how media power operates through a discursive articulation which relies on the invisibility of imperialism and interpellates the ‘British Subject’ whilst constructing the ‘other’. It aims to close down alternative political imaginaries and futures. Ultimately, the legacy of empire, via the power of the hybrid media, constitutes a significant barrier to political change in the UK. This, in turn, carries serious and important implications for the health and potential of British democracy and Britain’s role in world politics.
