Third Text

21.1

Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar, Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415441179
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155006
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Third Text is an international scholarly journal dedicated to providing critical perspectives on art and visual culture. Third Text addresses the complex cultural realities that emerge when different worldviews meet, and the challenge this poses to Eurocentrism and ethnocentric aesthetic criteria.

Historiographies of Laughter

Poetics of Deformation in Palestinian Political Cartoon

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

I dream of the intellectual destroyer of evidence and universalities, the one who… doesn’t know exactly where he is heading nor what he’ll think tomorrow because he is too attentive to the present

Michel Foucault, Intellectuals and Power

I would only believe in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spint of gravity – through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come; let us kill the spińt of gravity! I have learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

While Walter Benjamin’s epigraph universalises ‘texts’ as much as it demystifies them, and Foucault’s maps out the alignment of power relations for the righteous intellectual, Nietzsche’s impish comment offers a possible reflection on Palestinian political cartoons during the al-Aqsa Intifada. For the leading Palestinian cartoonist Baha’ Boukhari, killing the spirit of gravity, believing in the dancing god and abandoning the solemn devil were directed towards a singular action: deforming the ugly realities of the Israeli colonial condition through his political cartoons, that unique combination of pictorial, editorial and creative commentary which takes political, cultural and social criticism beyond the written word.

1 The data consists of samples of cartoons from Baha’ Boukhari’s official website: http://www.baha-cartoon.net. Boukhari is a Palestinian cartoonist working for al-Ayyam, a Ramallah-based independent Palestinian newspaper, which first appeared in 1995. Born in Jerusalem in 1944, he is considered one of the founding fathers of modern Palestinian caricature along with the assassinated cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. Boukhari worked for three of the most prominent Arab newspapers: the Kuwaiti daily al-Qabas (1964–88), two Palestinian dailies al-Quds (1995–99) and al-Ayyam (1999-). His prolific output is legendary: he has been publishing editorial cartoons every single day since 1964. For further reviews on modern Palestinian caricature, see: Ramzi Al-Tawil, ‘The History of Palestinian Caricature’, in Sameeh Shbeeb, Studies in Media, MUWATIN-The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, Ramallah, 2005, pp 11–100; and Faysal Darraj, The Misery of Culture in the Palestinian Institution, Dar Al-Adab, Beirut, 1996, pp 147–56.

The humour in Boukhari’s political cartoons during the Palestinian uprising of 2000 and its aftermath demonstrates their use not just as a pictorial form of Palestinian national narrative but also as a vehicle to ridicule the Israeli other and to ‘magnify’ the immoral treatment of the Palestinian people by reading the signs of the coloniser and reformulating them. In addition, political cartoons juxtapose several humorous modes in their portrayal of dormant Arab politics, the double standards of American foreign policy and the position of the international community symbolised by the United Nations.² Through the thematic treatment of these political cartoons, we can examine the validity of their approaches and call into question theories of traditional humour and the social meaning they produce. Their significance in contemporary Palestinian history has escaped the notice of social scientists, critics and historians. What is the significance of a national pictorial narrative that reflects epistemological paradoxes within the colonial context?

2 A feeling of universal betrayal overshadows most of Boukhari’s political cartoons. This motif recurs in variations on the pictorial maxim of the ‘three wise monkeys’ carved over the entrance of Nikko Toshogu temple in Japan, which represent the Buddhist teachings of Vadjra to hear, see and speak no evil so that we ourselves shall be spared evil. Boukhari mocks and denounces the three monkeys of Arab, Islamic and international silence vis-à-vis the suffering of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation.

Since the early 1940s, a critical literature has arisen to investigate a decoding theory for political caricatures. Lawrence Streicher claimed that aspects of graphic imagery could be used to examine the effect environmental factors have on the content of political cartoons.³ WA Coupe rejected Streicher’s claims and argued instead that the lack of available research and the multi-faceted nature of the medium make the development of a truly universal theory impossible.⁴ Since their time, existing scholarly research has been divided into five categories: effects, functions, rhetorical, thematic-content and observational modes of analysis. These five approaches are not mutually exclusive. Their integration offers a useful scheme for research conducted on political cartoons in multi-ethnic societies in general, but perhaps less useful for those overshadowed by a colonial condition as in the Palestinian case.

3 Lawrence Streicher, ‘On a Theory of Political Caricature’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, IX: 4, 1967, pp 427–45

4 WA Coupe, ‘Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, IX: 1, 1969, pp 79–95

Palestinian political cartoons have lacked proper research to trace their impact on viewers within the colonial condition and their peculiar amalgam of myths. Not bound by the same norms of conventional media or by the decoding systems of other iconographies, these cartoons provide an alternative perspective from which one might view the political behaviour of governments and masses. Satire delivered by their graphic imagery has greater elasticity, or perhaps ‘hidden sharpness’, to address matters and send signals that written editorials fall short of conveying. This elasticity charges both cartoonists and their viewers with the Nietzschean ‘lightness to dance’, the ability to ‘kill the spirit of gravity’ and the will to conceive the ugly truth in a more sublime manner. One may recall that political cartoons have ‘the ethical imperative which lifts transitory journalism into transcending art’ for they are considered to ‘invoke not only truth but a higher artistic truth, above the ethical parameters of the printed word’.⁵ The facts are not often consistent with the ‘truth’ of their graphical representation; political cartoons were always fated to bear two defining features: simplification and amplification.

5 William Koetzle and Thomas Brunell, ‘Lip-reading, Draft-dodging and Perot-noia: Presidential Campaigns in Editorial Cartoons’, Press and Politics, 1996, 1:4, pp 94–115, p 116

The apparent ‘unique universal characteristics’ of political cartoons have, no doubt, helped cartoonists to establish their own ‘higher artistic truth’. Among these ‘universal characteristics’ we can count the running critical commentary on events that simultaneously offers daily assessments of the political mood in a crisp, lucid and visually reinforcing manner. ‘Slipping under the radar of critical reflection’, cartoons also seize on the privilege of employing humorous diversion to make political statements and convey powerful messages as they impersonate truth and construct communication lines that connect the ‘obscure’ masses with the ‘well-known’ politicians.⁶

6 For further elaboration see T Bivins, ‘Format and Preferences in Editorial Cartooning’, Journalism Quarterly, 1984, p 61, pp 182–5; and Medhurst and DeSousa, 1981.

Such characteristics convert political cartoons from being a mere attempt to ‘kill the spirit of gravity’ to a persuasive political force that contributes significantly to the creation and manipulation of public opinion and to the setting or ruin of political agendas. Harvey Weiss suggests that cartoonists, by inviting their viewers to read beyond ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Revolution in the Post-Fordist Revolution? Notes on the Internet as a Weapon of the Multitude
• Notes from the Beirut Siege
• Repetition and Return: The Spectator’s Memory in Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy
• Obscene Jouissance: The Visual Poetics of Labour Exploitation
• Challenging the Canon: Socialist Realism in Traditional Chinese Painting Revisited
• In Conversation
• Historiographies of Laughter: Poetics of Deformation in Palestinian Political Cartoon
• Listening to Trauma in the Art of Everlyn Nicodemus
• Reviews
• Call for a Cultural Boycott of Israel: Open Letters
• Books and Exhibition Catalogues Received
• Contributors