Political Cartoons Research Articles

Lingua-cultural strata of modern American social media: Precedent phenomena in anti-Trump discourse

Modern media discourse abounds in linguistic units with cultural value including precedent phenomena that fulfil different functions and are employed to achieve particular political goals. Multi-modal (creolized) media texts making use of precedent phenomena as efficient tools of encoding meaning are of special interest. The goal of the study is to identify the role of the precedent phenomena of the English lingua-culture in the production and organization of discourse in the politically engaged network segment of modern American media. The focus is on anti-Trump discourse. The material spans the period from June, 2019 to November, 2020 and comprises 250 sampled examples, mostly multi-modal texts, including Facebook and Twitter posts by anti-Trump communities, political cartoons and memes, and random instances of Internet communication. The research methods applied in this study were critical discourse analysis and multi-modal critical analysis complemented by lingua-cultural method, stylistic analysis, and sampling. The author systematizes the repertoire of the precedent phenomena of the “anti-Trump discourse”, singles out their classes and types, identifies the spheres-sources of the precedent phenomena, and describes their cognitive and discursive functions, as well as the conditions and mechanisms for the actualization of the precedent phenomena in media discourse (thematic repertoire, extralinguistic and linguistic discursive strategies). The study argues that precedent phenomena affect the production and organization of discourse and possess significant potential for influencing mass audiences and molding public opinion. The study concludes that the use of precedent phenomena was an effective vehicle of digital activism and helped to achieve the political goals of American opposition organizations in the 2019-2020 pre-election period.

Multimodal Media Tools of Popular Geopolitics: Russian Politics in Foreign Media Cartoons

The article focuses on the political cartoons about Russia and analyzes the potential of multimodal media texts as the tools of popular geopolitics. The author also employs S. Hall’s concept of propaganda, considering the text of a caricature from semiotic perspective. The integration of the theoretical fields of popular geopolitics and propaganda is substantiated, since political cartoons not only form stereotypes about politics and international relations among media readers, but also perform propaganda functions, broadcasting the point of view of the information platform on Russian politics and Russia. The empirical base of the study embraces 242 political cartoons from Russian-language and English-language foreign media, posted in the public domain on the Internet in 2020-2021, the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Political cartoons are analyzed with the method of expert evaluation and interdisciplinary classifier for the analysis of political cartoons. The obtained empirical results were subjected to statistical processing, including the identification of correlations. The results demonstrate that in foreign media political cartoons about Russia and Russian politics create two different images of Russia. The first description is typical for English cartoons where Russia appears in the context of international relations, mostly its ties with the United States; and the target character in English cartoon is the Russian president. Englishlanguage cartoons are more often focused on harsh criticism and the use of schematized images. Moderate criticism dominates in Russian-language cartoons of foreign media; the target characters are not only the president, but also other representatives of Russian society. Thematically, Russian-language cartoons are constructed in the context of Russia's internal political problems; the field of education is usually the most intentionally “negative”. According to the study, it is the Russian-language cartoons of foreign media that have the most complex and rich visual code and use Aesopian language. In conclusion, the author highlights the importance of further studies of the tools of popular geopolitics, as well as the need to improve the practice of creating multimodal media texts in the logic of the Russian understanding of geopolitics.

Taboo metaphtonymy, gender, and impoliteness: how male and female Arab cartoonists think and draw

ABSTRACT The debate about whether the sexes communicate and behave differently continues. The stereotype that women are not funny or that their language or behavior is more “ladylike” is very widespread and has been current for decades, if not centuries. Gender differences in politeness and humor were also frequently reported by early anthropologists, sociolinguists, and cognitivists, but many modern linguists are far from convinced by such findings. Examining multimodal communication, a development phase within many fields, may help us find evidence to support or undermine a sociocognitive hypothesis such as women are more polite or are naturally less funny than men. Using a corpus of political cartoons, this study identifies whether there are gender differences in the use of taboo language and humor, putting special emphasis on impolite metaphor and metonymy. The results of this research show no differences between male and female cartoonists in the use of taboo or impolite metaphors and metonymies. Rather, individual variations are reported. This analysis, then, offers a new window on an age-old question about how men and women think, communicate, and behave.

Mexican-Origin Newsmakers: Utilizing Health in La Opinión Microfilm for Data Collecting and Methodology.

The Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, in microfilm format from the 1960s, shows how the margins of archival repositories are filled with the voices of marginalized communities. Archival data about the Mexican-origin population has proven scarce throughout the twentieth century; not until 1980 was the term “Hispanic” added to the census and the group categorized in governmental repositories. This paper takes the reader on a journey through the depths of the Los Angeles County Library, into the fourth-floor basement where the entirety of La Opinión is stowed away in reels. This paper covers the challenges and rewards of archival research as well as the process of conducting archival research. Equipped with lived experiences in Mexican enclaves in Los Angeles, the researcher recognizes the voice of the community in ads, announcements, political cartoons, and throughout the margins of the newspaper. This article also offers an analysis of the opinions from the community about health care and raises questions of whether health-care services sufficiently met the needs of the community.

Review: Civil Religion Today: Religion and the American Nation in Twenty-First Century, edited by Rhys H. Williams, Raymond Haberski Jr., and Philip Goff

Review: <i>Civil Religion Today: Religion and the American Nation in Twenty-First Century</i>, edited by Rhys H. Williams, Raymond Haberski Jr., and Philip Goff

Cherian George and Sonny Liew, Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship

Cherian George and Sonny Liew, Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle Against Censorship

News discourse as a source of metaphorical creativity in political cartooning

It is through news reports in the press or on television, radio or the Internet that people learn most of what they know about their environment or the world beyond their daily experiences. This paper raises the question: to what extent can a trending topic in news discourse become the source of metaphorical creativity, and which factors contribute to this fact? It uses the systematic analysis of multimodal metaphors in a corpus of political cartoons. The genre conventions of the political cartoon generate a particular form of engagement with the news, which in turn shapes the metaphors that political cartoonists use in their work. An editorial or political cartoon is a text, especially one in a newspaper or magazine, concerning a topical event and therefore, by definition, plays a crucial role in the reproduction of knowledge. Finding a fresh angle on a breaking news story and using this to create another piece of media content, such as an editorial or political cartoon, is often referred to as news-jacking. The question is not whether topical news stories are reproduced by journalists — it is whether they offer unique opportunities to journalists, influencing their choice of metaphors. A comparative study of cartoons about a range of topics across different cultures would deliver useful insights into how topical news items may shape the metaphors that political cartoonists use to offer expert comment. In so doing, this paper moves beyond the confines of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), presenting fundamental challenges to a theory that was originally developed based on linguistic and artificial data.

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Adam Matthew Digital's historical, primary source‐focused platform, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era (TGAAPE), can support interdisciplinary studies across academia, including any research that may make use of historic documents relating to gender studies, business, urban development/planning, social work, philanthropy and development, literary studies, architecture, and political science. It also includes high-quality contextualizing secondary materials to facilitate student learning and pedagogical opportunities. Highlights of the collections include the materials of William M. Tweed (Boss Tweed); unpublished documents from Edith Wharton; insightful and biting political cartoons by Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler; correspondence from the Rockefeller and Astor families; and corporate records from the railway, steel, and oil industries.

Trump’s image in a political cartoon: analysis of expressive potential

This study is an attempt to describe the expressive means used in American political cartoons covering the most prominent events before and during Donald Trump’s presidency. Political cartoon as a type of political text is widely adopted in political communication with the aim to manipulate people’s minds. The results of the study show the functioning of verbal units at all language levels and nonverbal means (visual metaphors and symbols) that help cartoonists show the Trump’s presidency in a humorous way and shape public opinion about the 45th president of the United States. The graphical means comprising capitalization, font and red colour captivate the reader’s attention by emphasizing the key issues in the cartoons. Phonetic means which are sound effects and sound repetitions stress Trump’s emotional condition, underlying his immediate reactions to any criticism. The lexical means such as comparison and antithesis draw the parallel between Trump and other political actors stating Trump’s role in American politics as a leader. Syntactic techniques (exclamatory, interrogative, and rhetorical sentences) point at Trump’s problem solving skills, and his original ideas. Symbols, hidden in the cartoons, contain extra linguistic information that is necessary for understanding the cartoonist’s message. Visual metaphors transmit the information through easily recognized vivid images and comparisons.

A Pragmatic Study of Political Cartoons in Al-Ahram Weekly Newspaper

During the past century, political cartoons were considered as the most extreme form of expression in newspapers, as they were not committed to any norm of journalistic objectivity, or even the domain of objective reality. Some cartoonists consider political cartoons as historical sources of satirical critique of the political status quo. Generally speaking, there are various forms of cartoons, such as political, social, and humorous cartoons. Each one has a different function.&#x0D; The function of political cartoons lies in making a real change in a society in favor of suppressed classes through criticizing the status quo and unjust practices in political life. In addition, cartoons help newspapers and magazines look better by taking some space among columns of words which might be boring for the reader. At the same time, political cartoons have real contributions in affirming the role newspapers play as means of communication between a reader and a cartoonist. Political cartoons are also capable of bold dealing with different societal problems as they can escape different types of censorship. Thus, political cartoons have the mechanisms to correct the negatives of a society faster than written words, especially they are easily understood by readers.&#x0D; As cartoons are viewed as methods of communication, pragmatics is also concerned with determining the elements of communicational content, which are essential to interpretation. It is quite common for an utterance to display a number of pragmatic features. Hence, it is clear that pragmatics plays a key role in the interpretation of the communication process represented by the cartoons' language. This communication process, whether verbal or non-verbal, includes expressions and recognition of intentions. From this perspective, pragmatic interpretation is simply an exercise in which a reader infers a cartoonist’s intended meaning from his cartoon.&#x0D; Within this framework, this study tries to discuss the aspects of the implicit meanings in the language of political cartoons. The importance of the study is obviously shown by shedding light on the role of the language that can be employed to convey explicit and also implicit meaning by pragmatic devices. This study, therefore, attempts to clarify the role of pragmatic devices in explaining the hidden meaning in political cartoons. In doing so, it tries to emphasize the importance of implicature in the language of political cartoons, whether it abides or flouts Gricean’s maxims with its effect to convey the meaning. Also, it attempts to figure out why cartoonists frequently use this aspect of pragmatics in writing the language. Another goal of this study is to explain the role of speech acts, whether used directly or indirectly, and why a cartoonist sometimes uses the literal and sometimes prefers to use non-literal speech acts.&#x0D; Moreover, this study underscores the importance of the distinction between language use and linguistic meaning. Besides, it asserts a parallel distinction between speaker's reference and linguistic reference, which provokes the assumption to what extent linguistic expressions refer independently to speaker's use of them. In addition, this thesis attempts to consider the politeness phenomenon as a pragmatic device, and its role in understanding the meaning. &#x0D; Given the distance between a cartoonist and his addressees, this study sheds light on how language users sometimes depart from the conditions of optimal information exchange which may cause confusion. In addition, this thesis emphasizes the function of deictic expressions and the role of presupposition with its relation to the implicature. In short, it shows the linguistic insights of implicit meanings employed in cartoons and attempts to discover whether or not cartoonists succeed in conveying the meaning to the addressees by employing pragmatic devices.

APPROACHES OF INFORMAL AND CASUAL COMMUNICATION IN POLITICAL CARTOONS

The current study tries to investigate approaches to communication, including dysphemism and euphemisms in political cartoons. Free expression of public opinion and personal, political cartoon humor and got an essential part of the information and data arena. That makes the political cartoons genre more related and remarkable than before. This given cartoon comprises visual and verbal components, making the selection of communication means in the text particularly challenging. That defines the problem of our survey. The paper has investigated political cartoons published in the USA media. Making use of the content analysis method, we chose 174 dysphemisms and euphemisms, split into lexical-semantic classifications. As a consequence, euphemisms are utilized more commonly in political cartoon than dysphemisms, which stemmed from the genre specificity; hence, the ironic impact is attained by the contrast between the visual and verbal components.

PICTORIAL AND MULTIMODAL METONYMY IN POLITICAL NEWSPAPER DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF BREXIT REPORTS

This paper analyses several examples of pictorial and multimodal metonymy found in political cartoons and photographs related to the topic of Brexit and collected from the two British daily newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph. The first part of analysis deals with instances of pictorial metonymy, emphasising the importance of certain distinctive features such as colour, graphic representation, or photographic composition. The second part of analysis focuses on multimodal metonymy of the verbo-pictorial variety, particularly scrutinising the relationships between the two modes. Based on the different ways in which the pictorial and the verbal mode interact, the examples are classified into three separate categories: (1) image-dominant metonymy, (2) text-dominant metonymy, and (3) complementary metonymy. Furthermore, the analysis sheds some light on how these metonymies can form the basis of pictorial and multimodal metaphors, how several source and target concepts can be chained together within a single metonymy, and how metonymy in visual communication can also possess an indexical, rather than merely iconic character.

The Graphic Satire of Robert Minor and Art Young: Text and Image in Political Cartoons

ABSTRACT Graphic satire is a key site for the study of text and image in modern periodicals. Political cartoons assemble text and image into one unified form that conveys a message to its audiences in an immediate and powerful way. Often humorous, political cartoons rely on some previous knowledge on the part of the reader-viewer and are highly specific to the moment in which they are published. The graphic satire of two important radical political cartoonists, Robert Minor (1884–1952) and Art Young (1866–1943), is studied in this article. These two artists innovated in the aesthetic and linguistic strategies used in political cartoons, and published dynamic, compelling graphic satire in a range of radical periodicals in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their work for the socialist periodical the Masses is the focus here. The Masses innovated and experimented with graphic form, page layout, and quality of reproduction that made it a singular site for the reproduction of highly inventive graphic satire.

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico by Vanessa Freije

Reviewed by: Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico by Vanessa Freije Stephen D. Morris Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico. By Vanessa Freije. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, p. 286, $27.95. In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores how Mexico City's print media shaped the narratives and the changing political landscape during the period stretching from the 1960s through the 1980s: a turbulent and critical period in Mexico's political and democratic development. Freije accomplishes this by focusing on a series of "citizen scandals:" the mediated spectacles that through a variety of interpretations contributed to the "meaning-making practice of urban citizenship" (p. 3). The scandals examined in the book include: the embezzlement scheme in agrarian lending institutions in the early 1960s and the government censorship of Los hijos de Sánchez, the controversial book about urban poverty (chapter 1); the scandalous rumors in Nezahualcóyotl in 1974 that vaccines were sterilizing children (chapter 2); the debates surrounding the discoveries of huge oil reserves under López Portillo to the eventual denunciation (and jailing) of Pemex director Jorge Díaz Serrano (chapter 3); the Rio Tula murders and the explosive case of "El Negro" Durazo, Mexico City´s corrupt and murderous police chief during the López Portillo (federal) and Carlos Hank Gonzalez (Mexico City) administrations in 1982 (chapter 4); the 1985 earthquake, with particular attention on the collapsed sweatshops (chapter 5); the coverage and narratives surrounding electoral fraud against the PAN in the 1986 state elections in Chihuahua (Chapter 6); and briefly, the publication of the book Un asesino en la presidencia? in 1987 that accused the PRI´s presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, of involvement in the killing of a young servant as a child and its subsequent relationship to the denunciation and jailing of the leader of the oil workers union, Joaquín "La Quina" Hernández Galicia (epilogue). Throughout, Freije leverages the concept of "mediated citizenship" as the process by which urban Mexicans developed their perspectives and understandings of the political system through everyday interactions with the mass media. For students of Mexican history and Mexican journalism in particular, the account provides an in-depth look at the evolution of modern Mexican media. Discussion centers on the major institutional actors (Excelsior, Unomasuno, La Jornada and other Mexico City newspapers), particularly the rise of the news weekly Proceso in the wake of the government´s forcing out the editors of Excelsior; major personalities and opinionmakers like Manuel Buendia, Heberto Castillo, Agular Camin, Carlos Monsivais, Elena Poniatowska; and the influence of radio, television, flyers, comics and political cartoons, and urban graffiti. [End Page 234] Interwoven throughout the analysis is the dynamic and evolving relationship between the state and the media that parallels the democratic changes taking place during these years. Through various methods, the Mexican state had long controlled and censored the Mexican press. Debates and coverage during the scandals, however, effectively pushed the limits on what was permitted, ever so slightly forcing open the political system. At times, coverage simply escaped government controls. Following the 1985 earthquake, for example, media revealed deep-seated corruption and a state incapable of responding to the destruction and providing basic human services. Here, as in other examples, the government felt threatened by what it saw as uncontrolled organizations and demands from below, demands that they saw as being pursued outside the scope (and controls) of the government and the party´s (PRI) corporatist structures. Thanks largely to the narrative of Carlos Monsivais, the public came to see the experience as an illustration of the ability of civil society and the people to surpass and assume the role of the state. The mediated traumatic event proved critical to the rise of civil society organizations and gains by political opposition, putting Mexico on the road to greater political opening. Part of this dynamic involved the way the government sought to shape the narrative and counter those produced by journalists and opposition politicians. Under such circumstances, the government employed its allies within the media, offering an elite and cosmopolitan perspective, as in the reaction to the widespread rumors...

US Foreign Policy during the Presidency of Trump: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Selected Political Cartoons in Al-Ahram Weekly

US Foreign Policy during the Presidency of Trump: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Selected Political Cartoons in Al-Ahram Weekly

Russian Propaganda: A Case Study in Turkish Political Cartoons

Russian Propaganda: A Case Study in Turkish Political Cartoons

Race, Gender, Nations, and Politics through Women’s Bodies: The Female Combatants (1776)

Political cartoons have long been regarded as a significantly influential medium of media throughout the American Revolution. The subjects of these cartoons are often embodiments of political and racial stereotypes prevalent in Britain and America during the Revolution era. However, the role of feminine figures illustrated as ‘vessels’ embodying countries or symbols communicating said stereotypes in early American prints remains considerably broad, thus perpetuating the need for further research regarding this phenomenon. This paper aims first to understand the political cartoon scheme in America during the War of Independence, as well as analyze symbols within the political cartoon, The Female Combatants (1776), to consider how interpretations of popular female allegories affect how nations, race, and power are shown in political cartoons. In establishing the relevance of these findings in modern media, this paper extends the conclusions of gender-based models in political cartoons to understand the depiction of female combatants in the leaked Abu Ghraib prison scandal images. The findings of this study concluded that because womanly figures are often tied to notions of nationalism, female representations of nations are used in the media to express various symbolic elements that represent power in gender, race, and politics in a way that connects with existing schemas regarding women.&#x0D;

Community-building through political cartoons in Kenya, South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire

This paper arises from a research project at the University of Leicester, led by Dr Fransiska Louwagie and Dr Di Levine, in collaboration with a broader team of research associates, in particular Drs James Illingworth and Sarah Weidman. The project built on external partnerships with Cartooning for Peace, an international organisation of press cartoonists, and Shout Out UK, an award-winning platform for political and media literacy. The project was funded by the University of Leicester’s Global Challenges Research Fund. It aimed to examine how political cartoons can foster dialogue and exchange in conflict or post-conflict contexts, particularly amongst young people. As a visual medium relying on humour, cartooning has the power to present critical questions in an open and non-threatening manner, triggering dialogue and meaning-making. In line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 the project therefore set out to investigate how political cartoons can help to negotiate local and global tensions and how they engage audiences with conceptions and definitions of community and humanity. It aimed to shed new light on the question of how political cartooning can help to address challenges in (post-)conflict societies, where there is a recognised need for community-driven resilience building. Relating to this, through its focus on press cartoons, it sought to raise awareness of the need for access and freedom of information (SDG 16.10). Following an open call for projects, a commission was made for four series of workshops by external partners working in conflict-and post-conflict situations, in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa (see appendix for detailed aims of the call).

The Politics of Pre-Narrative Seriality

This contribution examines Uncle Sam's development during the nineteenth century as an interesting case study for transmedial character theory, an increasingly common approach to the study of fictional characters. However, as Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman have argued, "older forms of transmedia franchises were constructed on character sharing rather than on the logics of a particular world" (17). Characters were and still are in many cases the nodal points and intersections of various processes discussed as media convergence, yet the distinctions between "actual" characters and related terms such as "cultural icons" (Brooker) or "serial figures" (Denson and Mayer) remain somewhat contested and often hard to draw in practice. This contribution addresses these issues by investigating the nineteenth-century emergence and transformation of Uncle Sam as a recognizable figure within political cartoons. Without any overarching creative authority or any consistent "storyworld" to speak of, these cartoons lend themselves to recontextualizations by any artist able to uphold a recognizable iconography. In media-historical terms, political cartoons that did not merely comment upon actually existing public persons but instead developed their own inventory of allegorical figures are an important link between earlier, more "static" pictorial personifications of—and symbols for—countries and ideas and the later emergence of serial characters within comic books and other narrative media.