Decoupling Visibility from Narrative Authority: Farmer Voice and Agency in CCTV Rural Documentaries, 2012–2024

Li Xiaxia (Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia)
Yanti Heriyawati (Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia)
J. Julia (Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia)
Hery Supiarza (Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia)

Kasta: Jurnal Ilmu Sosial, Agama, Budaya dan Terapan
Vol. 5 No. 3 (2025): Desember

This article examines a representational problem that becomes visible only when screen presence is separated from interpretive power. In rural documentary, a farmer may appear frequently, speak in the first person, and exercise consequential agency while the explanation of structural causes and the final evaluation of change remain elsewhere. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative, diachronic multimodal analysis of an official-source-verified purposive corpus of seven CCTV/China Media Group documentary season/program records spanning 2012-2024, the study distinguishes presence, visibility, voice, agency, and narrative authority as non-equivalent dimensions of mediated subjectivity. The sampling unit is the season/program record; narrative segments and audiovisual units are nested analytical units rather than additional cases. The corpus is organized into three analytical periods (2012-2016, 2017-2020, and 2021-2024) and examined through repeated viewing, key-segment transcription where retained records permit, visual-verbal coding, cross-modal checking, and deviant-case analysis. Findings show an expansion from livelihood-, labor-, and cultural-memory-centered positions toward participation in poverty alleviation, changing farmer-land relations, agricultural technology, ecological construction, and rural public affairs. That expansion is real but uneven. Earlier farmers already display practical judgment and domain-specific agency, while later figures can remain dependent on narrators, officials, experts, data, and institutional frames for problem definition, causal explanation, and outcome evaluation. The article therefore conceptualizes mediated subjectivity not as a single empowerment continuum but as a differentiated allocation of experiential, actional, and interpretive capacities. Its contribution is to separate agency as power over action from narrative authority as power over interpretation, operationalized through problem definition, causal/motivational explanation, and evaluative authority.