Regional Identity

Stereotypes:
- London:
Chavs, rich, black people
- Essex:
Orange, stupid, fake
- Scotland:
Wears kilts, ginger
- France:
Snails, frogs, smell
- Wales:
Sheep shaggers
- Cornwall:
Farmers

Andrew Higson (1998):
"Identity is generally understood to be the shared identity of naturalised inhabitants of a particular political - geographic space - this can be a particular nation or region."

"Representation of national/regional identity are contracted as the narrative as the text unfolds, as characters are pitted against one another, so a sense of identity emerges... but at the ams time producers often resort to stereotyping as a means of establishing characters and identity."

"Stereotyping is a form of shorthand, a way of establishing character by adopting recognisable and well established conventions of representation... the stereotype reduces characters to the most basic form and attempts to naturalise them and the more widely recognisable they because the more readily they are accepted. Except that if a stereotype becomes more widely recognisable it becomes comic."

"As Britain becomes visibly multicultural, so the makers of media texts have attempted to deal with plurality, to find space in representation for cultural minorities, ethnic or otherwise. In doing so, the cultural boundaries of the nation have been redefined, and a wider, more extended and hybrid national 'community' imagined."

Benedict Anderson (1983):
"The unification of people in the modern world is achieved not by military but by cultural means - in particular the media system enables people (of a nation or region) to feel part of a coherent, meaningful and homogenous community."

Corrigan (1992):
"Identity is fluid, unstable and contingent on circumstances."

Medhurst (1997):

"They’re awful because they’re not like us"

Colloquial dialect.

Semantic Field

OCR G322 - youtube revision clips