Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship by Cherian George and Sonny Liew (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship by Cherian George and Sonny Liew Nhora Lucía Serrano (bio) George, Cherian and Sonny Liew. Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship. The MIT Press, 2021. 448 pp, $34.95. [End Page 100] As a graphic novel academic entry in the MIT Press’s distinguished “Information Policy” series, which focuses on the “analysis of significant problems in the field of information policy … as well as state-law-society interactions,” Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship is a nuanced, complex, and well-researched book by Cherian George—tenured professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication and Film, who writes on media and politics and served as a former art editor of a newspaper—and Sonny Liew—Eisner-winning comic artist for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), the first graphic novel to win the Singapore Literature Prize for fiction. But the reader should be first advised that Red Lines is not merely another peer-reviewed academic book in a prestigious series from the highly regarded MIT Press; Red Lines breaks the traditional format of a scholarly publication by being an ambitious, in-depth, and zine-like scholarly reportage that privileges over sixty cartoonists’ personal voices and their notoriously drawn political images. Banned in Singapore in 2021 under the Undesirable Publications Act for including reproductions of cartoons deemed offensive by religious groups (e.g., Charlie Hebdo’s 2012 cartoons depicting Muhammed, as well as denigratory depictions of Jesus Christ and Hindu deities), Red Lines provocatively illustrates how political cartoons from around the world—drawn commentary on current affairs—are a crucial visual indicator of “society’s state of democratic freedom” (vii). From the outset, Red Lines establishes that political cartoons are a very “basic form of political speech,” hinting at George and Liew’s ingenious collaboration and thus their objective in selecting the cartoon medium—editorial cartoons, caricature, comic strips, memes, and graphic novels—to paint a portrait of censorship in the twenty-first century (vi). Put simply, Red Lines is not a primer or a sweeping historical account on the political cartoon per se; it is a scholarly graphic monograph about graphic political speech and censorship. First, structurally speaking, George’s well-researched work on political cartoon censorship is theoretically sound and grounded in stellar scholarship. This encyclopedic knowledge comes through in the many interviews and in how the overall book is organized, i.e., not by chronology but rather by familiar and erudite journalistic topics like post-Orwellian censorship, censorship by seduction, market censorship, gender-based censorship, hate speech, and the aura of the sacred, to name a few of the chapter headings. These related topics, and thus interrelated chapters, permit the inclusion of a multitude of political cartoon examples and cartoonists (both well-known and marginalized voices) that together recall a well-written editorial piece in an international newspaper column or on a televised evening news anchor report. Second, aesthetically speaking, Liew’s overall artwork is the necessary partner in this nontraditional scholarly work because it is simultaneously familiar/unfamiliar, varied, and purposefully jarring. The aesthetic style is reminiscent of the early zine style of “cut and paste” because Liew’s aim is to let the other cartoonists’ signature handiwork (and not necessarily his own renowned, award-winning style) “speak” to the reader. In this manner, from the very first drawn [End Page 101] image, Liew is in essence a graphic rhapsode. To rephrase, with the aid of his drawing tools, Liew channels his twenty-first century contemporaries so that their stories of censorship endured can take center stage and so that their political cartoons can grip the reader, not Liew’s previous work. Together, George and Liew deliver a thorough, if at times dense and challenging, compilation of graphic messages that criticize those in power along with the corrupt hierarchical structures in place. Consequently, this smart and dynamic collaboration recounts stories of our contemporaries and the various types of censorship that these cartoonists have endured, including “violence, laws and regulations restrictive of speech, social ostracism or worse—mob action, and money” (vi). Indeed, Red Lines...