Virality in the environment of political cartoons: when history intersects representation

• Authors: Vinod Balakrishnan , Vishaka Venkat , Muthukumar Manickam
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The context for the paper is the inclusion of a 64-year old cartoon in the Political Science textbook that caused an uproar in the Indian parliament in 2012. The controversy draws attention to the two-facedness of any political cartoon which is an artistic representation of a historical event. It is, hence, ambivalent by being an expression of artistic freedom as well as a humorous comment on history where the axis of representation intersects the axis of history. The representation of the Dalit icon, Ambedkar, was objectionable to the political party espousing the Dalit cause which, through its leader, Tirumavalavan, raised the issue in parliament. The paper posits that the reaction was an event that was hitherto dormant and that it erupted on account of elements that fed its potential for virality in the environment, thereby, turning it into a fact. To this end, the paper revives interest in the imitation theory of the French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, who, incidentally, was an intellectual influence on Ambedkar. Moreover, it employs Zeno Vendler’s distinction between an “event” and a "fact”, the Deleuzian idea of “assemblage,” and the idea of “conceptual metaphor” as laid out by Lakoff and Johnson. The paper reads the vicissitudes of the cartoon in order to theorize the elements that cause virality in a communicative environment.

Keywords

EN

Historical Axis, Representational Axis, Metaphor, Ambivalence, Imitation, Event

• Publisher: Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies
• Journal: The European Journal of Humour Research
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2

Dates

published

2019

online

2019-07-28

Contributors

author

Vinod Balakrishnan

author

Vishaka Venkat

author

Muthukumar Manickam

Identifiers

DOI

10.7592/EJHR2019.7.2.balakrishnan