An Analysis Of Africa’s National Image Constructed By The Economist’s Front Covers From The Perspective Of Visual Grammar

National image is in a close relationship with national interest,and Africa is one of the important strategic cooperative partners of China for pursuing The Belt and Road Initiative,so Africa’s national image will affect not only its own national interest,but also China’s.However,so far,the western mainstream media is the dominant discourse in Africa’s national image construction,which involves subjective awareness.Therefore,for the common interest of both Africa and China,to learn about the national image of Africa in international discourses is of necessity.Based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar theory(1996,2006),this thesis conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the 31 Africa-themed front covers of The Economist,dating from January,1997 to December,2017.An integration of qualitative and quantitative study is taken to analyze these covers from the three aspects of representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.It aims at solving the following three questions:(1)How do Africa-themed front covers of The Economist realize their representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning?(2)What national image has been shaped by these covers of The Economist for Africa?(3)What are the attitudes of The Economist towards the development of Africa?After the detailed analysis,the research findings are as follows:(1)The Africa-themed front covers of The Economist tend to realize their representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning in different ways.For representational meaning,the covers tend to adopt two or three kinds of processes in one cover.Among them,the symbolic process is most frequently adopted to represent the concept of Africa.The symbols mainly include Africa’s map,leaders,ordinary people;For interactive meaning,the covers tend to use offer gaze and close distance to show various events happening in Africa.However,those covers which show Africa’s positive images tend to use far distance and offer gaze;For compositional meaning,almost all the covers use center-margin arrangement to highlight the theme of the cover;(2)The front covers of The Economist shape a negative image for Africa,which focuses on those problems including infectious disease,riot,poverty,etc.The Economist recognizes the rising of Africa,but overemphasizes the negative side of Africa.(3)The Economist tends to observe the development of Africa from the sidelines and possess a stereotype about Africa,that is,a hopeless continent with a variety of problems such as diseases,poverty and anarchy.It has a conservative attitude towards Africa’s rising.