Race-baiting, Cartooning and Ideology: A conceptual blending analysis of contemporary and WW II war cartoons

Abstract

How is an enemy constructed? How is a human being turned into a demonized other who may be killed, bombed, tortured, and attacked? I explore visual manifestations of hatred in war cartoons from both a historical and contemporary perspective. While recent years have seen increasingly sophisticated extensions of Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor into the analysis of visual representations, I argue that Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of Conceptual Integration (aka Conceptual Blending) is better suited to explaining the mechanics of visual representation and their impact as carriers of ideological views. In the case of war cartoons, I focus on the mechanics of visual mis-representation, or how the techniques of blending such as topological conformity, metonymic shortening, and compression--can be used to serve an ideological end in order to lie, to exaggerate, or even to expose the truth. Special attention is given to the intersection of race-baiting, religious race-baiting and ideology, but I will also discuss classic techniques of dehumanization such as depicting the enemy as beast, germ, insect, reptile, criminal, etc. noted by the psychologist Sam Keen. My WW II examples come from the recently republished war cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as the author of Dr. Seuss’ children’s books. The contemporary examples concerning Iraq, Al-Qaeda, North Korea as well as images of the West come from a variety of world newspapers as available on the internet. I conclude that visual conceptual blends serve as a primary conduit for ideological systems, often as important or more important than language alone.