Colour Terms and Whiteness-Marking in Contemporary Television Series

This talk analyses linguistic references to whiteness in television comedy series from the United States and Australia.

For the US, we analyse two landmark series with First Nations showrunners: Reservation Dogs (Harjo & Waititi, 2021–2023) and Rutherford Falls (Helms et al, 2021 to 2022). We include an international comparison with data from Australia, consisting of a similar corpus of comedy series.

We first use corpus linguistic results to show that whiteness is an important identity category in both corpora, although it is expressed through different word forms. The Australian corpus features a wider range of lemmas (instances of whitefella, whitefellas, whitey, whities).

We then present a more detailed analysis of the word forms that occur in both the US and Australian datasets, namely white and whites. We undertake a comparative analysis of how these words occur, distinguishing between use as a surname, noun, nominalised adjective, predicative adjective, and attributive adjective.

Results indicate considerable overlap between the two corpora, with only a few differences, such as the unique use of premodified body parts, which only occurs in the Australian series.

Our second focus is on contextualising the uses of these words to unpack how screen creatives Indigenize Whiteness by marking it overtly in character dialogue. This act of marking disrupts the status of whiteness as a category that is typically unmarked and presupposed in mainstream discourses. As our analyses show, it also represents multiple opportunities for diverse discursive engagements with whiteness.

Date

Friday 22 August 2025

Time

1 to 2 pm

Location

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Professor Monika Bednarek
University of Sydney