South African Soap Opera Research Articles

Zulu masculinities in South African soap opera: Uzalo, Imbewu and Isibaya

ABSTRACT This paper explores the production and consumption of contemporary Zulu masculinities presented in three South African soap operas by Zulu male audiences living in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Exploring the interpretations of the constructions of Zulu masculinities in Uzalo, Imbewu, and Isibaya by the situated Zulu male audience provides insight into their various forms of identity and social experience, bearing in mind the dominant societal and media discourses on Zulu masculinities. Data was collected via three face-to-face semi-structured interviews with soap opera producers and thirty focus group participants who represent the soap opera audience. The analysis is conceptually guided by cultural studies active audience theory and masculinity theory, both from a constructionist perspective that explores the connection between discourses, masculinities, and popular culture. The argument is based on the idea that masculinity is not fixed and is constructed within a social context and that meanings bestowed upon objects and events are influenced by the audience member's frameworks of interpretation. The resulting analysis demonstrates that although there are deliberate attempts in soap opera's preferred messaging to subvert the dominant discourses of Zulu masculinities founded on machismo entrenched in Zulu tradition, as well as negative stereotyping, the audience participants predominantly decode these according to a hegemonic understanding of an ideal Zulu masculinity based on patriarchy. This negotiation of meaning is presented according to four themes, namely; opposing homosexuality, hegemonic masculinities vs “the sensitive man”, absent fatherhood as a (post) struggle identity, and polygamy as divergent decoding.

Soap opera viewing in a communal context

This paper presents some of the findings of an ethnographic audience study of the soapopera viewing patterns and interpretations of Zulu-speaking students living in residencesat a South African university (Natal University’s Durban campus) who watch The Boldand the Beautiful (an American soap opera) and Generations (a South African soapopera). Although the research undertaken covered various aspects of the soap operaviewing experience and the consumption of an international vs a local soap opera, thispaper will focus specifically on the nature of the viewing process and the ways in whichthe respondents relate to both soap operas, and it touches briefly on how the viewingpatterns of the students and their motivations for watching compare with audiencestudies conducted elsewhere in the world.

Isidingo as entertainment-education

In developing countries, the popular media can be used effectively to address socialproblems (Vaughan, Rogers, Singhal & Swalehe, 2000:82). In recent decades, variousdevelopmental, educational and other socially useful messages have often been includedin the content of soap operas (Mody, 1991).The producers of South African soap opera Isidingo are acutely aware of their socialresponsibility and therefore attempt to make a contribution towards social change andnation building. As such, Isidingo employs positive role models to transmit pro-socialmessages to its viewers. This paper will report on a study that explored the applicationof the entertainment-education (E-E) strategy in the local soap opera Isidingo byinvestigating the perceptions of female viewers in respect of self-reported knowledgeacquisition, attitudes and behavioural changes due to watching this programme.

Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation

Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation

Stereotyping and Essentialism: The Representation of Indigenous African Cultures in the Soap Opera Generations: The Legacy

The representation of indigenous African cultures in hegemonic soap operas remains a contentious issue. Critics and cultural activists have challenged the portrayal of African cultures from the prism of prescribed images and frames of reference. This article reports on a study that sought to ascertain how a contemporary South African soap opera, Generations: The Legacy, portrays indigenous African cultures. The study used a combination of quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis within the framework of Stuart Hall's audience reception theory. The results showed that Generations: The Legacy uses everyday discourse to highlight issues of patriarchy, gender relations, social inequities, power asymmetries, and contestations, as well as matters of domination and exploitation. While the show gives effusive expression to indigenous African cultures, it reuses existing sociocultural stereotypes prevalent in a divided society. It does not call attention to them so much as it re-enacts them. This representation can create tension and implicate intercultural relations and the survival of subaltern cultures, especially in a racially polarised and culture-sensitive society like South Africa. Soap operas can foster a more progressive and dynamic society by promoting a more nuanced depiction of indigenous values, practices and beliefs, and de-emphasising sociocultural stereotypes.

Code-switched automatic speech recognition in five South African languages

Most automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are optimised for one specific language and their performance consequently deteriorates drastically when confronted with multilingual or code-switched speech. We describe our efforts to improve an ASR system that can process code-switched South African speech that contains English and four indigenous languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho and Setswana. We begin using a newly developed language-balanced corpus of code-switched speech compiled from South African soap operas, which are rich in spontaneous code-switching. The small size of the corpus makes this scenario under-resourced, and hence we explore several ways of addressing this sparsity of data. We consider augmenting the acoustic training sets with in-domain data at the expense of making it unbalanced and dominated by English. We further explore the inclusion of monolingual out-of-domain data in the constituent languages. For language modelling, we investigate the inclusion of out-of-domain text data sources and also the inclusion of synthetically-generated code-switch bigrams. In our experiments, we consider two system architectures. The first considers four bilingual speech recognisers, each allowing code-switching between English and one of the indigenous languages. The second considers a single pentalingual speech recogniser able to process switching between all five languages. We find that the additional inclusion of each acoustic and text data source leads to some improvements. While in-domain data is substantially more effective, performance gains were also achieved using out-of-domain data, which is often much easier to obtain. We also find that improvements are achieved in all five languages, even when the training set becomes unbalanced and heavily skewed in favour of English. Finally, we find the use of TDNN-F architectures for the acoustic model to consistently outperform TDNN–BLSTM models in our data-sparse scenario.

Queering Family Dialogue through Entertainment Education: Narratives from Minority Sexual Identity Youth

This article examines how minority sexual identity plots in prime-time South African soap operas queered the family talk. It further explores how young people with (un)disclosed minority sexual identities navigate within these discursive or affirming dialogs that follow. Nine (9) participants (3 lesbian and 6 gay students) shared their narratives through one-to-one interviews on family dialogs after viewing minority sexual identities scenes in popular soap operas. The participants were selected through convenient and purposive sampling. Findings shows while minority sexual identities was a silent topic at home and marked with repression, repulsion, and threads in some families, other families appreciated the visibility, openness and realities of the contemporary South Africa. Three themes were identified. They are (1) normalization, heteronormativity & (self) regulation, (2) affirming heterosexual reactions and (3) navigating the family relations beyond the soap operas. Soap operas should be strongly considered as a pedagogical tool in various learning environments to solicit discussion about sexual diversity.

Gendered differences in the representation of men’s and women’s relationship to marriage and childbearing in business and economic contexts: A reading of the South African television soap opera Generations: The Legacy

abstractGenerations: The Legacy, a South African television soap opera, presents multi-layered representations of the daily lives of middle and upper class South Africans. It negotiates issues of culture, family dynamics, gender-based violence, abuse, business ethics, crime and generational wealth. The Broadcast Research Council (2019) reported that, in 2018, the programme had over eight million viewers in South Africa. Generations: The Legacy enjoys a daily 30-minute primetime slot on SABC 1, from 8pm, and it is broadcast internationally in Jamaica and India. Cultural and economic legacy dynamics form the narrative hub around which the story revolves, which is already apparent from the programme’s title. In the soap opera, male characters are represented as custodians of successful business leadership and as active participants in related socio-political dealings. Women, however, are represented as supportive participants in these business and economic dealings. The representation of women further suggests that women are incapable of independently and successfully participating in the generation of wealth. This article considers gender representations in the popular programme, with specific reference to themes around marriage and childbearing in business and economic contexts, and how these representations differ between male and female characters. In analysing the popular South African soap opera, this article will build on Connell’s (1987) concept of the gender order. The conclusion reached is that, although the programme realistically depicts the differentiated gendered roles of men and women in business and economic contexts, with marriage and childbearing as key contributors to the plot dynamic of such relationships, it fails to successfully challenge patriarchal perceptions of women’s rights and their roles in business and economic dealings.

Gender and naming practices, and the creation of a taxonomy of masculinities in the South African soap opera The Queen

CITATION: Ncube, G. 2019. Gender and naming practices, and the creation of a taxonomy of masculinities in the South African soap opera The Queen. Nomina Africana: The Journal of African Onomastics, 33(1):1–8, doi:10.2989/NA.2019.33.1.1.1331.

Synthesised bigrams using word embeddings for code-switched ASR of four South African language pairs

Code-switching is the phenomenon whereby multilingual speakers spontaneously alternate between more than one language during discourse and is widespread in multilingual societies. Current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are optimised for monolingual speech, but performance degrades severely when presented with multiple languages. We address ASR of speech containing switches between English and four South African Bantu languages. No comparable study on code-switched speech for these languages has been conducted before and consequently no directly applicable benchmarks exist. A new and unique corpus containing 14.3 hours of spontaneous speech extracted from South African soap operas was used to perform our study. The varied nature of the code-switching in this data presents many challenges to ASR. We focus specifically on how the language model can be improved to better model bilingual language switches for English-isiZulu, English-isiXhosa, English-Setswana and English-Sesotho. Code-switching examples in the corpus transcriptions were extremely sparse, with the majority of code-switched bigrams occurring only once. Furthermore, differences in language typology between English and the Bantu languages and among the Bantu languages themselves contribute further challenges. We propose a new method using word embeddings trained on text data that is both out-of-domain and monolingual for the synthesis of artificial bilingual code-switched bigrams to augment the sparse language modelling training data. This technique has the particular advantage of not requiring any additional training data that includes code-switching. We show that the proposed approach is able to synthesise valid code-switched bigrams not seen in the training set. We also show that, by augmenting the training set with these bigrams, we are able to achieve notable reductions for all language pairs in the overall perplexity and particularly substantial reductions in the perplexity calculated across a language switch boundary (between 5 and 31%). We demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to reduce the unseen code-switched bigram types in the test sets by up to 20.5%. Finally, we show that the augmented language models achieve reductions in the word error rate for three of the four language pairs considered. The gains were larger for language pairs with disjunctive orthography than for those with conjunctive orthography. We conclude that the augmentation of language model training data with code-switched bigrams synthesised using word embeddings trained on out-of-domain monolingual text is a viable means of improving the performance of ASR for code-switched speech.

Archetypes of memory and amnesia in South African soap opera

This essay investigates the relationship between memory, or rather amnesia, in the South African context and soap opera. South Africa has only recently celebrated ten years of democracy and the past still affects the lives of its inhabitants. The country has undergone far-reaching shifts in its political, economic and cultural paradigms. These also manifest in the production of meaning in popular visual culture, and more particularly, in soap opera. South Africans remember in different ways - processes that are reflected in the narratives of local soap opera. The genre is popular and its viewers invariably identify with the extended story plots. Amnesia often comprises a large part of soap opera narrative. This essay suggests that archetypes and myths of amnesia may shed some light on these recurring themes of memory and amnesia. Initially, archetypes and myths pertaining to memory and amnesia are discussed, followed by the exploration of its manifestation in local soap opera.

The landscapes and aesthetics of soap opera: Townships, television and tourism

Abstract The aesthetics of soap opera have been neglected within Television Studies, despite renewed interest in the aesthetics of television. Soap opera has frequently been regarded as a textual object unworthy and incapable of sustaining aesthetic attention, and the limited work that has been done on the cinematography of soap opera focuses on its realism. This article returns to debates on the cinematography of soap opera by focusing on the televisual aesthetic of the South African soap opera, Uzalo (2015–present). The visual pleasures of the landscapes of KwaMashu and KwaZulu-Natal distinguish it from other soap operas and offer new ways of understanding the aesthetics of soap opera. These ‘landscapes of television’ offer new ways of interpreting the conventionally ‘realist’ genre of soap opera through notions of the ‘spectacular’. Uzalo’s cinematography is read as an example of soap opera’s ‘spectacular realism’ that promotes a televisual tourist glance.

Automatic Speech Recognition of English-isiZulu Code-switched Speech from South African Soap Operas

We introduce a new English-isiZulu code-switched speech corpus compiled from South African soap opera broadcasts. isiZulu itself is currently under-resourced, and automatic speech recognition is made even more challenging by the high prevalence of code-switching in spontaneous speech. Analysis of the corpus reflects effects common in conversational isiZulu, such as vowel deletion and cross-language prefixes and suffixes. Baseline monolingual and code-switched automatic speech recognition systems are developed, including a new language model configuration that explicitly includes switching transitions. For code-switched speech, a system with language-dependent acoustic models and language-dependent language models linked by switching transitions leads to best performance, although word error rates overall remain very high.

Absent Presence: Candice Breitz’s Extra

In Extra Candice Breitz blurs the distinction between active producer and passive consumer. Her decision to insert herself, playfully and awkwardly, into the plotted action of a popular South African soap opera literalizes Breitz’s long-standing interest in occupying or invading the spectacle generated by the mass entertainment industry. Furthermore, the video prompts us to think in terms of racial difference: Breitz is the sole white presence in a cast of nonwhite actors, and she stands, literally, apart from them. But the metaleptic aspects of Extra ultimately remind us that the video is the product of volitional collaboration and negotiation between Breitz and the cast of Generations. Consequently, the piece avoids some of the critical shortcomings occasionally associated with her earlier work and embodies, in a provocative and parallel sense, Frantz Fanon’s emphasis on the need for mutual recognition.

Ideology and Subtitling: South African Soap Operas

This article investigates the ideological component of patronage in the subtitling of four South African soap operas: Generations, 7de Laan, Muvhango, and Isidingo. Taking the concepts introduced by Lefevere as point of departure, the article first discusses the various ways in which audiovisual translation (AVT) is subject to manipulation. This manipulation is shown to be a result of the fact that subtitles, as text superimposed onto the image during post-editing, thereby obscuring a small part of the screen, constantly foregrounds itself to the audience. This foregrounding is also affected by the linguistic background of the audience – whether or not they understand the original dialogue. The argument then turns to a discussion of AVT, and specifically subtitling, as rewriting. The link between language and ideology is discussed as it pertains to issues of power, particularly related to the role of English in the media, also in South Africa, where, in Gottlieb’s terminology, South Africa can be described as a multilingual anglophile context. The language policy of the South African Broadcasting Corporation is then discussed in terms of patronage and ideology followed by a discussion of the role of ideology in these four locally-produced soap operas. In this discussion the different ways in which the subtitling practices of the soap operas reflect ideology are investigated. The article concludes that accessibility plays a smaller role in subtitling in South Africa than the ideology of multilingualism and multiculturalism.

The psychological processes that culminate in audience loyalty to a South African soap opera

A model for the psychological processes that culminate in positive viewing experiences and audience loyalty to a soap opera is presented. The research was based on a secondary analysis of a qualitative market research study conducted for the SABC on the soap opera Isidingo. The analysis was conducted within a hermeneutic phenomenological interpretive framework. The model illustrates how viewers use soap-world knowledge and real-world knowledge to interpret the characters and storylines of soap operas, and that the degree of enjoyment the viewer experiences from viewing is dependent on the quality of the mental models formed of these respective components. The role that transportation, realism, social influences and timeslot play in the engagement process is also defined.

The black and the beautiful: perceptions of (a) new Generation(s)

This article sets out from the underlying belief that soap operas, like many other forms of popular media, play a role in ordering and rearranging people's everyday life routines, and inquires into some of the ways a South African soap opera functions as a barometer and a vehicle of constancy and change in contemporary South Africa. Focusing specifically on the longstanding South African soap opera, Generations, the article assesses this soap opera as both a product of post-apartheid South Africa and as a mechanism which maintains, and promotes changes in, its viewers’ preferences, beliefs and patterns of everyday life social behaviour. Following Robert Foster's argument on commercial technologies as conducive to constructing ‘national’ or collective entities (Foster 1999: 266–69; 2002: 69), the soap opera is regarded here as a ‘commercial’ technology through which a diversity of viewers are able to constitute a sense of themselves as sharing a wide range of discursive patterns, images, beliefs and lifestyle practices, even as it also motivates them towards social mobility, social action and social change. In terms of this themed issue's focus on cultural economy, the article further considers, albeit partially, the extent to which the production and consumption of Generations is driven by received political economic determinates (i.e. prescribed and shifting guidelines by the South African national broadcaster, the SABC, regarding how the popular media should be configured) which have themselves been transformed into a set of strategically managed socio-cultural determinants. The latter address, for instance, how the popular media in South Africa, and soap opera in particular, have been brought to bear on perceptions of individual selfhood and collective identity among consumers/viewers, and how socio-political change in South Africa is also reshaping representations of collective and individual aspirations of social mobility in popular media discourses and among the consumers thereof. Drawing on ethnographic television audience research, and a range of recent inquiries into South African soap opera by local scholars, I assess how the perceptions and viewing experiences of a group of young adult (female and male), black South African viewers of Generations interviewed for the present study, attest to some of the ways in which young adult South Africans are coping, through their viewing experiences, with the socio-cultural contradictions of South Africa's transforming society.

Visual methodologies through a feminist lens: South African soap operas and the post-apartheid nation

Using a discussion of South African soap operas, I will place the idea of visuality in a discourse analysis that incorporates a feminist epistemological lens, or an epistemology that integrates reflexivity and an acknowledgment of the dialogic nature of visual media. Through this discussion, I will examine the possibilities that dialogism provides for unpacking and exploring the politics of imperfect translation between the visual and the textual. These methodological interventions, I argue, will help enrich discussions of the visual’s role in the contested realm of geographic imaginations and move beyond the distanced position of the masculine gaze.

Multiculturalism in South African soap operas

This article explores the multicultural dimensions within the texts of three South African soap operas (soaps). It uses text analysis and interviews as a methodology to expose the intricate web of influences that are all part of the fabric of a South African soap. The text and discursive analysis are based on Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory of Halliday. The analysis of the texts proceeds from a pre-interpretation stage, through an analysis stage and into a revisit or re-interpretative stage. The creators of the texts as well as commercial bias are seen as politico-economic and cultural influences which may have direct bearing on the texts and are therefore interrogated. The findings confirm no multicultural model for South African soaps and show correlation between commercial interests and homogenised South African stereotypes.

South African soap opera as the other: The deconstruction of hegemonic gender identities in four South African soap operas

This article examines the potential role of soap opera narratives in the construction (or deconstruction) of identities within the South African context. The narratives of four South African soap operas (Egoli – place of gold, Isidingo – the need, Generations and 7de Laan) are analysed. Although identities of race and class are also relevant in soap opera narrative, this article focuses on gender identities. It is argued that soap opera may be constituted as other, and that it might therefore be a possible site for the deconstruction of hegemonic identities. Brief reference is made to Edward Said and the origin of the term ‘Orientalism’. This is linked firstly to the concept of the other, and more precisely the concept of ‘women as other’ as theorised initially by Simone de Beauvoir, but more specific to this article, Luce Irigaray. The second section argues that soap opera may be gendered as feminine and female and consequently marked as other for various reasons. The final section accepts the hypothesis of soap opera as feminine and female, and thus other, and attempts to analyse the relevant soap operas in terms of the negotiating or deconstructing of gender identities and the consequent social relevance of these texts.