Abstract
The representation of township culture has been a growing form of storytelling in South African telenovelas, resulting in increased engagement from the viewers. There is limited research that has been conducted on audience reception and representation of gangsterism, crime and prominent social ills in the township and the effect of television representations of these issues. This audience reception study of the representation of township culture focused on the popular South African telenovela Gomora (2020). The main objectives addressed in the study were: to document the most salient stereotypes and clichés associated with the representation of township culture in Gomora (2020) according to the viewers of Gomora (2020) residing in Alexandra, to investigate how the residents of Alexandra engage with the content of Gomora (2020) and to examine how viewers of different cultural backgrounds interpret representations of township culture in Gomora (2020).
The representation theory and audience reception theory guided the analysis of the study in order to address the main objectives. Drawing on Hall's (1997) analysis of encoding and decoding, this study sought to explore whether the participants' interpretations are dominant, negotiated, or oppositional. A combination of observation, textual analysis (of selected episodes in the telenovela) and semi-structured interviews with audiences of the telenovela Gomora (2020) based in Alexandra residents were conducted as part data collection. Thematic analysis was used to distil themes and sub-themes that were coded through observation of the episodes. The study explored audience reception, through decoding and encoding of media messages in relation to their personal struggles and encounters as residents of Alexandra. The study found the presence of negotiated reading of the media text whereby the viewers were an active audience that challenged some of the representations whilst also agreeing with the accurate representations. The prominent themes in Gomora (2020) were centralised around love, crime, substance abuse and tests of loyalty and betrayal. The participants revealed that the criminal acts represented in the telenovela mirror their reality residents whereby carjacking is the leading crime in Alexandra and they have been personally affected or involved in the act. It was further indicated that substance abuse is a common social issue in Alexandra that has affected many lives as some of the respondents shared that they are in the process of recovering from alcohol and drug abuse.