| dc.description.abstract | Former colonies of the British Empire are usually associated with the notion of postcolonialism and show how the population has had to cope with the inherited habits, rites and way of living of the English after such a long “occupancy”. It is the case in India, for instance. However, France was also an important coloniser at this time and spread its culture and language across the world. Like the United Kingdom, some of the territories that were colonised are still under the influence of their colonisers or even still part of the same country (part of the Commonwealth for example). In this study, I decided to research the way the media depicted people and events during the passage of Hurricane Irma in September 2017 on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean’s France, and compare and contrast it to the response of the US to the passage of Maria through Puerto Rico.
In order to have a broader overview of the material I was studying and expand my knowledge of the topic, I used the theories of various authors. Firstly, Saïd (1978) and his work on postcolonialism and the Orient. Moreover, I draw from Levy and Chevannes (2009) as well as Barclay and Asava (2013) who talk about the notion of identity in these once colonised (or still part of their colonisers’ country) territories. On the topic of identity, I also decided to make use of Dervin’s (2011) theories on identity and identification.
With the theoretical framework in place, I chose to execute my research with the method of the literary analysis. I consequently constituted a corpus, composed of fifty-one online newspapers’ articles, from Metropolitan French websites and French Caribbean ones for the one part of my study, and from mainland American websites and Puerto Rican ones for the other part. The articles selected were chosen after numerous keywords’ Google searches and archives’ searches on the newspapers’ websites. After looking carefully at each and every article that constituted my data set, I tried to compare the way the facts, and more particularly, the responses of the governments to the disaster, were depicted in each paper, and on each side - meaning French and American, but also islander and mainlander.
As the results of the study go, there were no prominent divergences between the reactions of the French Antilles vs Metropolitan media, in the full data that I had collected for France as a whole. However, the results for the American media showed that the facts in themselves showed a sort of postcolonialism, and the opinionated articles on both sides tended to support the Puerto Rican inhabitants asking to be treated equally to any other state.
To the question “How was the response from the homeland French government to hurricane Irma in the French Caribbean represented similarly or differently in the media from the one from the US homeland government to hurricane Maria which struck Puerto Rico in the same period?”, I could answer that, from what I have seen and studied, the reactions were pretty divergent. It challenged my idea of the fact that France, not having come to an end with its past as a coloniser, would have acted disinterestedly towards its territories’ victim of Hurricane Irma. What I found was quite strikingly the opposite. The US reacted the way I expected France to do, although America was born from an association of colonies.
Nonetheless, my study is far from exhaustive and further research with a bigger range of countries possessing overseas territories and comparison of such depictions in the media over time could be manners to improve the relevancy of this study. The notion of identity, however, is ubiquitous in the texts and reveals that there still is an opposition between national governments and the overseas territories in general. That could be explained by the fact that they do not live in the same areas and have a different history upon which they built themselves and their cultures. | |
