Dangerous Depictions: A Visual Case Study of Contemporary Cartoon Controversies

Abstract

With their increasing global dissemination, visuals have assumed an important role in international political communication. The crisis sparked by Muhammad cartoons that swept the globe in early 2006, re-emerging two years later with the republication of the cartoons, testifies to the global conflict potential of visuals. Language barriers still set limits to global textual communication, yet visuals transgress those barriers and evoke different responses in different cultural contexts. In this paper we compare three connected cases of cartoon controversies in the year 2006: the cartoon conflict triggered by the publication of 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting Muslim prophet Muhammad; the follow-up event of a cartoon competition initiated by the Iranian government, ridiculing the Holocaust; and “free-riding” on the global impact of the Muhammad cartoons, and 12 cartoons published in Bulgaria, depicting Libyan leader Khadafi in the context of a trial of Bulgarian nurses, accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV ¹ .

¹Our thanks for alerting us to this cartoon conflict go to Deyan Vitanov, who participated in the first stage of research.

Notes

¹Our thanks for alerting us to this cartoon conflict go to Deyan Vitanov, who participated in the first stage of research.

²The term “enemy image” is a translation from the colloquial German term “Feindbild.” As with many translations, what sounds right in one language does not translate fully into another. For the deeper etymological meanings of “Bild-image-visual” see Müller (2007).

³For a discourse analysis of Khadafi cartoons in Germany as well as other “enemy images” published in German newspapers (Iran's Khomeini and Iraq's Saddam Hussein) see Link and Schulte-Sasse (1991).

⁴Retrieved October 17, 2006, from http://www.bta.bg/site/libya/en/02chronology.htm

⁵The movie is listed in the International Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1198399/