Within the South African and Belgian contexts, Public Service Television remains a key role player in the dissemination of ideas around national identity. Moreover, whiteness manifests as one aspect of national identity in both contexts and remains (to differing degrees) a normative construction. This article presents the findings of a controlled case comparison of a sample from two community soap operas (7de Laan and Thuis, broadcast by the South African (SABC) and Flemish (VRT) Public Service Broadcasters respectively) from the perspective of Critical Whiteness Studies. What my analysis sought to investigate was how the politics of belonging play out in these PSB narratives and the possible implications this holds for local as well as global discourses of whiteness and power in Public Service Media. The analysis revealed three rhetorical devices which function to maintain whiteness as hegemonic ideology in both texts despite the fact that they originate in disparate contexts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.