Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair ed. by Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler (review)

Asian Punches is a landmark publication not only for its scholarship on Punch itself but for its scholarship on how Victorian periodical culture transcended national and cultural boundaries to become a truly global phenomenon. This collection goes substantially beyond all earlier studies of that most prominent of London-based comic periodicals and modifies our appreciation of Punch at a time when its significance has come under some scholarly pressure (see, for example, Henry J. Miller, "The Problem with Punch," 2009).

In seventeen essays, the editors and contributors explore the alternative and hitherto largely unacknowledged histories of Punch beyond its original British context. Considerations of space prevent me from mentioning all the excellent contributors, but the assembled authors demonstrate why they represent the cutting edge of periodicals research in their respective national or transnational fields. A welcome contribution from Brian Maidment examines "The Presence of Punch in the Nineteenth Century" (including an appraisal of Punch's European and British imitators) before the Asian contexts are explored by geographical region. Chapters engage such topics as the myriad Punches of the Subcontinent, the enigmatic Cairo Punch, and the China and Japan Punches, as well as other periodicals.

Inevitably, there is some overlap between individual chapters (for example, between Partha Mitter's and Ritu Khanduri's chapters, which bookend the section on South Asia), but rather than seeming repetitive, this is actually a strength of the volume. It helps do justice to what is an extremely rich and complex field, giving the reader a sense of the sheer depth of scholarship within the volume and providing a foundation of knowledge that invests readers in the Asian Punches project with the same level of interest as the original attendees of the Heidelberg seminar and the contributors to this volume.

The contributors demonstrate how Punch was read and consumed in the far-flung corners of Britain's formal and informal empire but also how it was adopted, subverted, and reimagined for very different readerships. Many of these readerships were characterized by anti-colonial sentiment; having a Punch of their own provided the means by which the subaltern might join battle with British imperialism in order to better foster resistance to the mechanisms of colonial control. For example, Indian Punches were a means of reinforcing and sustaining the legitimacy of cultures subjugated by foreign masters and maintaining a sense of Bengali, Nawahbi, or other difference in an entity deemed to be essentially homogenous by official condescension. Original cartoons by John Leech, John Tenniel, or Linley Sambourne were burlesqued to admonish or approve of Britannia or John Bull from the Indian or more local perspective and as a means of expressing Indian opinion on matters supposedly beyond the purview of the colonial subject: the foreign machinations of the great powers or even matters of domestic British politics and culture.

But in some cases—as in the Japan Punch, explored by Peter Duus—the staff and readership of a periodical were less invested in an anti-colonial agenda and more concerned with preserving their existing sense of Britishness in an environment where this seemed under threat. For example, Charles Wirgman's Japan Punch, which was created and sustained in the Yokohama international settlement, observed the period of Japan's Meiji restoration from the perspective of an affectionate outsider. While its pages are filled with comments on the strangeness of Japanese culture, it was by no means disrespectful of that culture. Indeed, its most stinging attacks were reserved for British officials or the local French or Americans. It was perhaps this ambivalent attitude that attracted native Japanese to the foreign periodical and its humor and that inspired them to adapt it for their own purposes.

The volume also raises interesting historical questions about the origins of periodical and comic culture outside the Western context. To what extent was British- and European-style satire "imported" wholesale from outside Asian contexts? Or did the Punch model succeed...