viz. - political cartoons

Cartooning Crisis - Images After the Japanese Tsunami

Cate Blouke — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Pedro Molina, Managua, Nicaragua "El Nuevo Diario"

Ten days after the cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake in Japan, we have only a small sense of both the immediate and long-term consequences for the country. Political cartoonists world-wide are manipulating the image of the Japanese flag, positioning the crisis as a national tragedy/catastrophe and exploring the aftershocks. The resulting images are interesting for both their visual simplicity and the complex arguments they (inadvertently?) construct.

Addressing the pedagogical implications of images and tragedy, Megan's thoughtful post from Friday opens with another manipulated image of the Japanese flag in which the rising sun has morphed into a tear drop. That image highlights the sorrow of the tragedy - evoking global sympathy for a nation in crisis. Yet from another perspective, the image could also represent a drop of blood - acting as either a memorial for those who died or, theoretically, a call to arms. Though I doubt those are the intended readings, I merely want to point out that even fairly straightforward images can be sites of contestation.

The images above and below strike me as more overtly complex arguments about the disastrous consequences for the nation. In Molina's image, the sun is now a skull, cracked and disintegrating. While the image immediately points toward the massive death toll (8,450 dead and 12,931 missing at the time of writing), it also posits the disaster as crippling (and potentially lethal) for the nation as a whole.

John Sherffius, Colorado, Boulder Daily Camera

Various cartoonists have played with images of fracture and symbolic post-quake cracks, but Sherffius presents a sun severed completely in half. The image posits a rupture, with one half of the nation more grievously effected. Unlike the red teardrop which unifies the nation's grief, Sherffius' image points towards an irrevocable severance.

While the symbolic value of the flag makes it universally recognizable (and superficially simple to read), when cartoonists combine the flag with other "easily recognizable" symbols of Japan, the effects become more opaque.

Damien Glez, Journal du Jeudi, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Several dozen representations of the Japanese flag combined with the radioactive symbol have emerged in the last week, but they are mostly presented as solitary images - either the flag itself or a deserted flagpole. Damien Glez, however, depicts an anxious samurai waiving the flag aloft. The image is troubling for the way in which it suggests a connection between the radiation crisis, military aggression (a warrior in full dress) and surrender (waiving a white flag). In the post-WWII fallout this image might have made more sense, but it seems both anachronistic and insensitive now.

Political cartoons inevitably exploit stereotypes for both simplicity's sake and for comedic value, but many of the cartoons emerging after the tsunami raise questions about our ability to access and comprehend foreign nations. While the Japanese flag and the image of Godzilla are certainly immediately recognizable, if these are the images through which we understand Japan, what does that say about us?

Paul Zanetti, Australia

Reboot: DADT and Public Sacrifice

Megan Eatman — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:51:33 +0000

Image credit: Chan Lowe, The Lowe Down

The above cartoon, republished yesterday on the artist’s blog, makes a very effective argument against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The use of flag-draped coffins, signifying shared tragedy, suggests that dying for one’s country has little to do with sexual orientation and that is rather the work that an individual does—in this case, sacrificing his/her life for the United States—that matters. In this kind of public sacrifice, the image suggests, everything individual is erased. However, this message seems more complicated when considered in relation to one of Tim Turner's earlier posts and the wider cache of meanings that these coffins suggest.

Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT,2/15/2009

Last year, Tim discussed speculation as to whether President Obama would change Pentagon policy and allow the publication of photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim suggested that this debate was in large part about the tension between public and private sacrifice (a difficulty that the eventual solution addressed), although there are obvious issues of information control as well.

When thought of in the context of public/private tension, Lowe’s cartoon could also be translated as an argument for making these coffins visible, as the coffins signify an act of public sacrifice, the death of a soldier, rather than a man or woman. The suggested erasure here could also be troubling in the debate on DADT. Lowe’s image’s suggestion that being a soldier is an overriding identity seems like it could actually be appropriated as an argument for DADT, suggesting that, in the military, you are a soldier above all else and can therefore be told to conform to gender and sexuality standards. Obviously,that argument is problematic (why these standards?) and extremely discriminatory, but it makes visible some of the complications that arise in the public/private tension around soldiers’ bodies.

Tim’s original piece is below, and here. For more discussion of images and DADT, see this recent post on No Caption Needed.

Start of Tim's post:

At his first televised press conference last week, President Obama received a question about a controversy that, though once debated quite energetically, had seemed for a time to recede into the background as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers has fallen. The questioner wanted to know whether the new administration would order the Pentagon to reverse its policy of forbidding the publication of photographs showing the return of fallen soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (President Obama responded by not commenting, since the policy is currently "under review.")Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT, 2/15/2009

The question, and the issue, were covered yesterday by The New York Times in a story and an editorial urging the President to overturn the policy. As the author of the former summarizes the issue, "Part of the debate that has developed turns on whether the return of soldiers is a private or public matter. While families have registered a range of opinions about allowing the news media at Dover, many have maintained that the return of a body is so deeply personal that they should be able to decide whether to keep it private." Above and beyond the questions raised by the difficult question of how to treat the images of what is essentially both a public and a private sacrifice (a soldier dying for his or her country is also lost to his or her family), the debate itself is simply a reminder of the power of images to move arguments.

Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Magnificent Mezzotints

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:32:38 +0000

Image Credit: A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections

I thought I’d step back from the contemporary pop culture discussions today to look into two archives with a more historical emphasis: the Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection and A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections. Both of these collections offer extensive resources for instructors in eighteenth-century literature, politics, art, and culture.

The Lewis Walpole Library, which contains over 11,000 digital images, focuses on the library’s “world-renowned collection of English caricatures and political satirical prints from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Included are works by Bunbury, Woodward, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Newton, among others.” The Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections intersects with the Walpole Library’s Digital Collection as the latter is one of the former’s sources, but this websites indexes such satires by name and year.

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection

In terms of usability, both websites lack some help. The catalogue’s index is useful to the viewer who knows a particular print they’d like to find, or who is looking for something from a specific title, but the site features no searching capacities. The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection has a search feature which looks through the call number, the artist, or the image’s title, but their images are not organized by important keywords or popular figures in the images. A search for “Rowlandson” can turn up a number of prints by this famous illustrator, but a careful search would need to be done to find the particular one where he satirizes the Prince of Wales who, during the 1788 Regency Crisis when King George III was thought to be mad, schemed to take over the throne.

Image Credit: The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Since both collections deal with images held by research libraries and museums (like the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art), all of these images are under copyright. Both websites are open to the public to use, and all of the images are available for personal use and even “study purposes,” so their use in the classroom should be fine.

What these websites might help provide for students in rhetoric classrooms is the opportunity to analyze visual material whose context is less familiar to them, but which was popularly produced and reproduced to do specific cultural work. Since most of these prints are satires, they can be compared in purpose and function to contemporary political cartoons in terms of their strategies. For educators focusing on the eighteenth-century, this material opens up and might indeed accompany a study of the popular period literature. I hope some of my readers here at viz. will find this material useful for their classrooms.

Cartooning Obama

Nate Kreuter — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:19:43 +0000

Right off the bat, I want to say that I'm not accusing contemporary political cartoonists of creating racist depictions of Barack Obama. But I do wonder, is that tough to avoid? Political cartoons typically accentuate the subject's features in unflattering ways. They're caricatures. Remember George W. Bush's enlarged ears? The problem is that, with the nation's first African-American President, cartoonists have to avoid a whole history of racist cartooning. They have to simultaneously do what they've always done, which is make fun of the most powerful person in the world, but without referencing a racist visual history.

Consider this racist cartoon:

(Image from the Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum)

That's probably a scary referent to have in the cartoon history books if you're an editorial cartoonist working today. I'd be curious to hear what others have noticed on this dilemma, but it seems to me that most cartoonists are simply emphasizing Obama's skinniness and height, so as to avoid any of the racist references. But then there are some cartoons, like this one, that seem to be flirting with the historical racist images:

For those of you interested in cartoons...

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:22:53 +0000

Wonkette runs a weekly feature in their "Joke and Dagger Department" in which they get the "Comics Curmudgeon" to look at the week's political cartoons. This week focuses on the (wo)man-beasts slouching towards the White House: