Political Cartoons as Burkean Frames of Acceptance: The Comic Framing of Ramaphosa’s Revolution

Abstract

While political cartoons have been read as criticism in Kenneth Burke’s burlesque rejection frame, this paper presents an alternative reading, to consider their potential for expressing attitudes of acceptance via comic framing. A Burkean vocabulary for studying cartoons is provided, including the mechanism of perspective by incongruity, the attitudinal alignments of acceptance and rejection, the genres of comic framing and burlesque, as well as the phenomenon of bureaucratization of the imaginative. South African cartoons featuring president Ramaphosa are then analyzed to illustrate how cartoons can potentially offer more nuanced political critiques when expressing comic discounting rather than burlesque debunking. The paper is concluded by reflecting on the civic potential of comic framing, as a constructive alternative to polemical cartooning.