Picturing the Charlie Hebdo Incident in Arabic Political Cartoons

Abstract

This article investigates how the Arabic political cartoons picture the mocking cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the French satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine.1 It is noticed that the cartoons utilize the Charlie Hebdo incident as a locus to deconstruct the unjustness and bias of the Arabic leadership and the international community in their dealing with some Arabic political issues. The surveyed cartoons also used the Charlie Hebdo incident as a locus to formulate the Palestinian “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991). I argue that the surveyed cartoons use the strategy of “differentiation” (Meyer, 2000) based on the self vs. other dichotomy to establish this deconstruction and imagined community. The study uses the semio-linguistic and visual rhetorical tools (Barthes, 1972), and self-categorization (Turner, 1987) to achieve this deconstruction, through an analysis of semiotic-discursive aspects of a small corpus of Arabic political cartoons. The findings indicate that promoting a discourse of fear and danger toward the inside and outside actors is what constitutes this self-other-based identity.

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