Before the political cartoonist, there was the Vidusaka

Political cartooning was one among the many cultural products that colonial rule introduced in India. This British legacy has been used to produce narratives about the nature and history of Indian cartooning. However, these narratives have, invariably, overlooked the distinctly Indian cultural ethos as well as the Indian satirical tradition. The paper proposes an alternative model by positing that in the Indian satirical tradition, the Vidusaka – the comic figure in Sanskrit drama - has been an antecedent to the political cartoonist in terms of the social and political role as well as the nature and purpose of the humour. The paper also locates the principles of caricaturing in precolonial Indian visual arts, and presents the early vernacular cartoons as the point of convergence between the local satirical tradition and the western format of the political cartoon which laid the foundation for a modern yet specifically Indian sensibility

Conceptual blending and (im)politeness in political cartooning

This paper is meant to give an account of multimodal (im)politeness in political cartoons, drawing primarily on critical discourse studies (CDS) (in particular, Teun van Dijk’s notion of “context models” and Paul Chilton’s concept of “critical discourse moments”), blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and speech act theory (especially Geoffrey Leech’s most recent revisions of Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson’s notions of negative and positive face). There is of course an abundant literature on blending theory, but the potential of this theory for analysing face-enhancing or face-threatening multimodal discourse has not been fully realised. It is shown that political cartoons can exemplify not only face attack but also face enhancement, and that blending theory can contribute to the comprehending and critique of sociopolitical action or linguistic and nonlinguistic forms of control that may operate in the world. The article thus demonstrates the value that results from merging critical cognitive linguistics and sociopragmatics.

Politics of visual discourse in China: the corruption cartoon

This article investigates single-panel cartoons portraying official corruption in China’s longest- running state-owned cartoon newspaper Cartoon Weekly ( Fengci yu youmo). A total of 433 cartoons are identified as relating to corrupt officialdom between 2012 and 2019 in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption signature policy. In contrast with the individualizing critique of political cartooning in liberal democracies, the corpus of corruption cartoons investigated in this article is argued as a didactic form of visual schematization in a pseudo-self-critical discourse typically buttressed by verbal reading instructions. To support this claim, the article addresses its politics of visual discourse by employing Peircean hypoiconicity, consisting of direct resemblance, diagrammatic schematization and metaphoric displacement. Accordingly, the article identifies three major features of corruption cartoons as anonymization of direct resemblance, visual schematization of policy and metaphoric displacement of conventional symbols.

How to Read Equipo Maíz

This article examines the work of the popular education collective Equipo Maíz headquartered in El Salvador. Equipo Maíz is noteworthy for its contributions to the analysis of Salvadoran and Central American politics, economics, and society since its formation in the early 1980s. This article situates the Equipo Maíz project, which uses plainspoken text paired with political cartooning, within a deep historical memory of opposition geared at demystifying the fictions that sustain capitalist sociality and its class antagonisms. Drawing on examples from Equipo Maíz’s weekly newsletter La página de Maíz and other select publications, the article demonstrates how the collective addresses a variably literate Salvadoran readership with the goal of imparting radical interpretative strategies geared toward the creation of an engaged political culture, despite the challenges of a closed media system.

How to do things with images: the editor, the cartoonist, and the reader

Depending on context: to depict soaring prices as fires is to perform the act of complaining; to portray the perpetrator of a sex crime as a wolf is to accomplish the action of condemning; to draw the ship of state sailing toward catastrophe is simultaneously to perform the action of warning and to issue a prediction; etc. It follows that, if political cartooning is action, then having a cartoon spiked is failure to act. The discussion of silenced speech acts cannot fail to have already been noticed by other scholars. Yet, so far little attention has been paid to this phenomenon, especially in multimodal and intercultural pragmatics. Apart from substantiating the claim that it makes sense to study speech acts in political cartoons, this article investigates the situational factors that may affect the editorial decision-making of a given newspaper. Using a corpus of selected American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian cartoons, it is argued that the appropriateness conditions of (verbo) visual speech acts (and of discourse generally) depend on the context models of the participants (cartoonists/viewers).

Freedom of expression in multicultural societies: Political cartooning in Europe in the modern and postmodern eras

At the intersection of modern cultural and political history, security studies and debates about freedom of expression and international human-rights law, this article aims to contribute to a better understanding of political cartooning and its implications in multicultural societies of Europe, which have shifted in a geographical, cultural, normative, communicational, political and many other respects through the last two centuries. Through comparison of the Serbian cartoons from late nineteenth-century Croatia and the recent Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, the article reveals that both modern and postmodern European cartoons have been centred around equally discriminatory narratives: a 'clash of civilizations' and 'racialization of religion'. Since open racial stereotyping in cartoons became illegal in the postmodern international regulations, traditional discriminatory practices of cartooning have shifted towards subtle, 'liquid' racism. This decodes some of the twelve Danish cartoons as ambiguous strategies of racialization of Muslim immigrants in Europe (as 'terrorists' and 'others') but also as hate speech which is illegal in the European Union, and member states of the Council of Europe. The author concludes that the most current European and international regulations of hate speech, whether concerning offline media or online media, actually protect free speech. While a truly clear-cut regulation of liquid racism might remain problematic in Europe (and the world) due to the lack of a universally accepted definition of hate speech, neither strict legal regulations nor different definitions of hate speech could diminish the role of political cartooning as a viable free speech platform in the multicultural landscape of Europe. Ultimately, what diminishes its viability is the enduring lack of diversity in the creation of visual satire, which could and should reflect the multicultural reality of communities, politics and societies in Europe.