‘God Gave This Land to Me’: parody, grievability, and settler-colonial semiotics in Nina Paley’s This Land Is Mine

Abstract

This study employs Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis through a decolonial lens, used here as an analysis of visual and typographic rather than inclusive of sonic resources, to examine how visual semiotics organise grievability in Nina Paley's animated parody This Land Is Mine (2017 cut). Reading effects in the text rather than authorial intent, it asks whether a parody that distributes blame symmetrically across all nationalist claimants nonetheless distributes recognition asymmetrically. Drawing on Mignolo, Quijano, Said, Wolfe, Butler's account of grievability, and Hutcheon's theory of parody, the analysis tracks colour, religious symbolism, social-actor representation, costuming, and typography frame by frame. To guard against confirmation bias, it incorporates a mandatory counter-evidence section testing the film's ‘universal indictment’ design. Findings indicate that formal equivalence at the level of plot coexists with an unequal allocation of mournable childhood, recurrent symbolic legibility, and typographic provenance. The study contributes a replicable Decolonial Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (DMCDA) framework and shows how parody can leave colonial asymmetries of recognition intact.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Critical Discourse Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗