The Twinings Case: A Multimodal Analysis of Commodity Racism in Television Ads

Abstract

Informed by the theoretical principles of (Black) British Cultural Studies and Gender Studies in their interconnection with Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, this current study shall demonstrate that two of the TV commercials produced by the Lowe ad agency for Twinings in the first decade of the third millennium cannot simply be read as culturally neutral. Indeed, rather than being exclusively aimed to influence their audience’s purchase choices, they can be considered, more importantly, an expression of the complex process of British identity shaping. More specifically, the multilayered analysis adopted demonstrates that the complex meanings conveyed by multimodal products can be fully understood on condition that the basic descriptive levels of language come under scrutiny in conjunction with the paralinguistic ones and the visual components, which inevitably acquire a communicative nature and end up orientating the perception of potential meanings. In turn, the interpretative analysis of the different above-mentioned layers cannot but be carried out in connection with macro discursive formations of which multimodality and its expressions are culturally specific products. Seen in this perspective, the ads examined seem to contribute to the reproduction of the traditional ‘White/Black’ binary couple and its inherent racial unbalance. In conclusion, this implies that the analytic grid taken into account makes it possible to detect clusters of meanings that, far from being politically neutral, prove to be either traditional or oppositional, thus betraying, respectively, forms of complicity with or resistance to dominant discourses.