Cartoonists make us laugh—and think—by caricaturing daily events and politics. The essays, interviews, and cartoons presented in this innovative book vividly demonstrate the rich diversity of cartooning across Africa and highlight issues facing its cartoonists today, such as sociopolitical trends, censorship, and use of new technologies. Celebrated African cartoonists including Zapiro of South Africa, Gado of Kenya, and Asukwo of Nigeria join top scholars and a new generation of scholar-cartoonists from the fields of literature, comic studies and fine arts, animation studies, social sciences, and history to take the analysis of African cartooning forward. Taking African Cartoons Seriously presents critical thematic studies to chart new approaches to how African cartoonists trade in fun, irony, and satire. The book brings together the traditional press editorial cartoon with rapidly diverging subgenres of the art in the graphic novel and animation, and applications on social media. Interviews with bold and successful cartoonists provide insights into their work, their humor, and the dilemmas they face. This book will delight and inform readers from all backgrounds, providing a highly readable and visual introduction to key cartoonists and styles, as well as critical engagement with current themes to show where African political cartooning is going and why.

Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examples and practices from elsewhere. This book provides a vital contribution to humour theory by developing a Global South perspective. Taking a wide-ranging view across the whole of the continent, the book examines the relationship between humour and politics in Africa. It considers the context of the production and reception of humour in African contexts and argues that humour is more than just symbolic. Moving beyond the idea of humour as a mode of resistance, the book investigates the 'political work' that humour does and explores the complex entanglements in which the politics, practices and performances of humour are located.

Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders by Ousseina Alidou examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences. While there is an abundance of social science studies giving voice to the dominant actors of hegemonic violence in Hausa society, there is a dearth of works that center the voices of the afflicted, unprivileged, and marginalized class, among whom are women and youth. One aim of this book is to examine the ways popular songs and fiction fill up the humanistic urgency to capture the dignity of the life of those dehumanized by local, national, and international hegemonic religious and secular forces. The book focuses on the resistance narratives of one female novelist and six song composers and performers that generate alternative counterhegemonic responses to dominant patriarchal discourses produced by cultural, religious, and political elites, thus reaching out to marginalized local and national communities and global audiences. Alidou interweaves the social, political, and biomedical epidemics with the concept of “Hausa interiority” to create a unique perspective on contemporary Hausa culture and politics through the lens of artistic productions.

Reenvisioning Israel through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018–2021 Electoral Crisis examines the ways in which the work of Israeli political cartoonists broadens conversations about contemporary challenges in the country. Matt Reingold shows how 21 cartoonists across 10 different Israeli newspapers produced cartoons in response to the country’s social and political crises between December 2018–June 2021, a period where the country was mired in four national elections. Each chapter is structured around an issue that emerged during this period, with examples drawn from multiple cartoonists. This allows for fertile cross-cartoonist discussion and analysis, offering an opportunity to understand the different ways that an issue affects national discourse and what commentaries have been offered about it. By focusing on this difficult period in contemporary Israeli society, the volume highlights the ways that artists have responded to these national challenges and how they have fashioned creative reimaginings of their country.

Antisemitic caricatures had existed in Polish society since at least the mid-nineteenth century. But never had the devastating impacts of this imagery been fully realized or so blatantly apparent than on the eve of the Second World War. In Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland, scholar Ewa Stańczyk explores how illustrators conceived of Jewish people in satirical drawing and reflected on the burning political questions of the day. Incorporating hundreds of cartoons, satirical texts, and newspaper articles from the 1930s, Stańczyk investigates how a visual culture that was essentially hostile to Jews penetrated deep and wide into Polish print media. In her sensitive analysis of these sources, the first of this kind in English, the author examines how major satirical magazines intervened in the ongoing events and contributed to the racialized political climate of the time. Paying close attention to the antisemitic tropes that were both local and global, Stańczyk reflects on the role of pictorial humor in the transmission of visual antisemitism across historical and geographical borders. As she discusses the communities of artists, publishers, and political commentators who made up the visual culture of the day, Stańczyk tells a captivating story of people who served the antisemitic cause, and those who chose to oppose it.

This book explores stand-up comedy as a relevant sociological phenomenon from a contemporary perspective, as both a symptom of neoliberal capitalism and the locus specificus of socio-political critique in the era of Empire. It draws a feasible connection between the conspicuous rise in the art form’s popularity over the past number of years and the dehumanizing and fracturing processes of the current dispensation that are increasingly becoming the defining experience of life in the contemporary era, and to which, understood in terms of the traditional humor theory of relief (of which Sigmund Freud is key), comedy serves as an obvious palliative. More than this, Taking Comedy Seriously: Stand-Up’s Dissident Potential in Mass Culture, in the Context of the Neoliberal Domain of 'Empire' questions the possibility of a contemporary aesthetics of humor, given that much of the art form is disseminated and controlled by the mass media, and as such complicit in its work. In particular, it argues that the ideological situation of global capitalism poses an obvious predicament for the possibility of a socio-politically efficacious stand-up comedy in that ironic and skeptical distance is already characteristic of postmodern cynicism, incorporated into the social fabric itself, effectively rendering the comedic technique of satire (synonymous with so-called ‘political comedy’) altogether appropriated, or at least compromised, and subsequently impotent. From where then does a site of resistance emerge? Through an analysis of a range of contemporary televisual, digital and literary examples from the comedic routines of American comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, and South African born (and now American comedic talk-show sensation) Trevor Noah, this book argues that a contemporary ‘political comedy’ is reliant on a structuring aesthetic logic built around dissent, disruption and difference.

This textbook showcases innovative approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a wide range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents. The diverse contributions examine how children and youth are simultaneously constructed: as individual subjects through social processes and culturally-specific discourses; as objects of policy intervention and other adult power plays; and also as active agents who act on their world and make meaning even amidst conditions of social, political, and economic marginalization. In addition, the book is centrally engaged with questions about how researchers take into consideration children’s and young people’s own conceptions of themselves and how we conceptualize child and youth potentials for agency at different ages and stages of growing up. Each chapter discusses substantive research but also engages in self-reflection about methodology, positionality, and/or disciplinarity, thus making the volume especially useful for teaching. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, youth studies, girls’ studies, development studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, education, history, geography, public policy, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies and global studies.