Academic literature on the topic 'Caricatures and cartoons – Political aspects – Denmark'

The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two newspapers in a liberal information context. Message propagation in a restrictive information environment was analyzed using the English daily Kuwait Times from the Middle East; the liberal information environment of the US was analyzed using two major dailies, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study also concurrently identifies and elaborates on the themes and frames through which discourse was presented exposing the cultural ideologies and premises they represent. The topic was approached with an interdisciplinary position with the support and applicability testing of Chatman's insider-outsider theory within information science and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory and Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model based in the area of mass communication. The study has also presented a new model of information censorship - circle of information censorship, emphasizing conceptual issues that influence the selection and censorship of information.

Thesis (MA (General Linguistics))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.
According to Nattrass (2007:138), the denial and questioning of the science of HIV/AIDS at government level by, amongst others, Thabo Mbeki (former State President) and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (former Minister of Health) resulted in an estimated 343 000 preventable AIDS deaths in South Africa by 2007. Such governmental discourse of AIDS denialism has been the target of criticism in the media and by activist groups such as the Treatment Action Campaign. This study investigates the nature of this criticism, specifically considering the critical use of metaphor in visual texts such as the political cartoons of Jonathan Shapiro, who works under the pen name of “Zapiro”. The purpose is to determine whether the nature of the criticism in visual newspaper texts differs from that of corresponding verbal newspaper texts, possibly providing means of criticism not available to the verbal mode alone. A corpus of texts published between August 1999 and December 2007 that topicalise HIV/AIDS was investigated. This includes 119 cartoons by Zapiro, and 91 verbal articles in the weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian. The main theoretical approach used in the analyses is Conceptual Metaphor Theory, developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1981), and its extension to poetic metaphor, developed by Lakoff and Turner (1989). Because of the socio-political nature of the problem of HIV/AIDS, the study also draws on Critical Discourse Analysis, including complementary concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics. The study reveals that visual and verbal texts make use of similar sets of conventional conceptual metaphors at similar frequencies, which confirms the predictions of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The study further reveals that the cartoons enrich these metaphors through four specific mechanisms of poetic metaphor, which the verbal articles do not. This indicates a significant difference between the two types of texts. Furthermore, it is found that the use of such poetic metaphors directly contributes to the critical power of the political cartoons. The study indicates that multi-modality in cartoons, which triggers single metaphoric mappings, adds a dimension to the critical function of the text that is absent in the verbal equivalent. The finding that the visual texts enable a form of cognition that is not available to verbal texts, poses one of the most significant avenues for future research. Thus, cartoons apparently achieve a type of criticism that is not found, and may not be possible, in the verbal texts alone. This makes the political cartoon a text type with an important and unique ability to articulate political criticism.

Defence date: 12 December 2008
Examining Board: Prof. Virginie Guiraudon (EUI/CNRS) Prof. Werner Schiffauer (Universität Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder) Prof. Adrian Favell (UCLA) Prof. Donatella della Porta (EUI – supervisor)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
The publication of the twelve Muhammad caricatures in a Danish newspaper in September 2005 led to the first large scale mobilisation and prolonged intervention in the public debate by Muslims in Denmark. This dissertation provides a description and analysis of the dynamics, characteristics and trajectory of Danish Muslims’ claims-making in response to the publication of the Muhammad caricatures. The thesis focuses on the determinants of Muslim claims-making during a well defined public controversy. As such, it aims to provide answers to the following questions: How were the grievances introduced by the Muhammad caricatures collectivized and turned into Muslim mobilisation? What role did the particular Danish context or Islamic ideas play in this process, and what kind of Islamic actors were active? Following a common assertion in much pub lic discourse about Islam stressing the incompatibility of Muslim claims- making and the political culture of secular democracies, the dissertation also investigates the extent to which the actual form and content of Muslim claims-making during the controversy challenged the principles of the secular public sphere The dissertation pays careful attention to the diversity of Muslim claims- making in the controversy and attempts to explain variance across types of Muslim actors, across time and between different arenas of claims-making. Departing from a theoretical integration of both social movement theory and elements of the sociology of religion, the dissertation argues that the nature of Muslim claims- making during the controversy was best described as de-essential, deexceptional and dynamic. Muslim mobilisation and claims-making was not predetermined, uniform and unidirectional, as has been suggested, but rather multivocal, multi-directional and multi-paced. Rather than leading to a unified protest, the publication of the Muhammad caricatures led to intense internal positioning among Muslim actors in Denmark. The claims-making by Danish Muslims seems to have been no more emotional, irrational or ideological than claims- making by other types of actors. In fact, the causal mechanisms driving Muslim mobilisation and claimsmaking in the controversy were similar to those driving other forms of contention. Thus, there seems to be little sui generis about Islam that made Danish Muslims react the way they did. Danish Muslims stressed partly different issues, solutions and interpretations of the principles of the secular public sphere than non-Muslim claimants did in the debate, but they did so using contentious performances and arguments that did not fundamentally challenge these basic principles. Finally, the claims- making of Danish Muslims during the controversy proved to be historically and spatially linked to prior instances of public smearing of Islam and the simultaneous actions by other claimants in the debate. Danish Muslims’ claimsmaking changed in form and content as the circumstances of the debate changed with, for example, the international escalation of the controversy.

In the last decade of apartheid (1985-1994), South African cartoonists demonstrated a range of responses to the political imperatives of the day. While some worked in support of the status quo, the cartoonists who are the subject of this study opposed it. Like practitioners in other areas of cultural activity during this period, oppositional cartoonists were passionately engaged with the political process and participated in the articulation and dissemination of discourses of resistance. This study situates South African cartooning both in the context of South African resistance discourse, and in the historical and discursive context of cartooning as a form of international popular culture. It presents an argument as to how cartooning should be defined and studied - as a cluster of signifying practices that produce a range of forms in a variety of media. In terms of this definition, anti-apartheid cartooning in South Africa is identified as a specific historical category, within which distinct streams of cartooning are identified. The study locates the various activities of South African cartooning within these streams, and examines the ideological and educational functions they performed during the 1985-1994 period. The study positions cartooning within the broad theoretical field of cultural and media studies, and examines some theoretical problems that are specific to the analysis of visual culture. A language of exposition appropriate to the study of cartooning is developed, borrowing terms from the sometimes widely variant traditions of art history, literary criticism and cultural studies. A methodology for the interpretation of symbolic forms is derived from the work of British cultural theorist, John B. Thompson (1990), whereby selected cartooning texts are subjected to a combination of textual interpretation, socio-historical analysis and discursive analysis, reinforced by insights derived from conversations with 15 selected South African cartoonists. Textual analysis of selected cartooning texts from the 1985-1994 period clearly demonstrates that oppositional cartoonists gave visual expression to discourses of resistance that existed in the anti-apartheid movement, and amongst the broader public, at that time. In so doing, they contributed to the disruption of the hegemony of the apartheid state, to the legitimation of the anti-apartheid struggle and to the provision of symbols and icons that ordinary South Africans were able to utilise in 'rethinking' their own lives in relation to the demands of a rapidly transforming society.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

This research clarifies the position of the contemporary Australian political cartoonist in the context of a changing media landscape, and examines the implications of the shift of dissemination of news and current events away from news print media to the Internet. The observation that the political cartoon has, throughout its history, adapted and evolved in response to various socio-political and technological changes invites the question of how the art form might continue to endure as a vehicle for subversive political comment in the digital media age. In exploring the creative possibilities afforded by new media technologies and analysing where these outcomes intersect with the conventions and functions of political cartoons, the study specifically locates the digitally constructed, political moving image within the Australian political cartooning tradition. This position is investigated and supported through three key activities: critical engagement with the extant literature; insights gained through interviews with professional, practising political cartoonists deemed to be pioneers of the political moving image; and my development of a creative practice centred on production and dissemination of political animations. The provision of a new, revised taxonomy for the critical analysis and classification of political images compels practitioners, scholars and prize-givers to eschew hitherto inviolable determinants in the characterisation of political cartoon images so that the tradition can endure in the foreseeable future.