Who is king
Abstract Mañalac, Margaret Gretel C. (2019). Who is King?: Norman King’s Self-Representation through Small Stories vis-à-vis His Representation in Mass Media. Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines Diliman.
This study examines the representation of indigenous people in conventional media, in comparison with their self-representation through their personal narratives in social media. Specifically, I studied the self-representation of Norman King, the first Aeta who graduated from the University of the Philippines, through his small stories such as photos, selfies, and status updates in his Facebook profile page. By juxtaposing the analysis of his small stories in his Facebook with his conventional mediated representation, my study aims to understand how Norman King through his small stories affirmed or countered the dominant narratives on IPs found in the mass media.
Through the semiotic approach, I examined the representation of Norman King in traditional media texts. Next, I analyzed how Norman King was othered or empowered in mass-mediated representations through the Orientalist lens. Third, I employed Georgakopoulou’s Small Stories Framework and Multimodal Semiotics to dissect Norman King’s self-representations that subvert or affirm his representations in mass media. The final stage of this research involved conducting a personal interview with Norman King himself to acquire detailed information behind his small stories and conventional mediated representations.
This research concludes that the mass media creates an empowered representation of Norman King by depicting him as an Aeta who is self-determined, invulnerable, proud of his ethnicity, open to cultural change and burdened with the problems of his community. However, he was othered in the media by romanticizing his ethnicity and depicting him as having self-agency only because he is literate. Norman King’s self-representation through his small stories, on the other hand, affirmed his empowered representations in the mass media by projecting himself as a proud, intellectual and self-autonomous Aeta. Meanwhile, his small stories subvert the othered representations in mass media by depicting the Aeta’s traditions and culture to counter his romanticized image.
This study contributes to the knowledge that seeks to go beyond common sites of mediated representations that place indigenous peoples as the other. This research underscores the importance of small stories as personal narratives that empower those who lack representation and help provide alternatives to the dominant narratives of the media.
Keywords: Small stories, postcolonialism, Orientalism, self-representation