The Power of Satire ed. by Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw (review)

The Power of Satire provides another sign that satire has become the most ubiquitous comic mode of the early twenty-first century. The book presents an international view, with essays on British, Italian, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Egyptian, Dubaian, Kuwaiti, Tunisian, and Moroccan examples. This multicultural approach enables an unusual scope for demonstrating a key premise of the collection: satire's "potentially divisive impact on societies" (1). In charting the diversity of public spheres in which satire operates now and has operated in the past, The Power of Satire provides evidence that the impulse to ridicule in artful ways is embedded in all human cultures.

The collection begins with a very brief retrospective of its two editors' previous research to set up an argument for new kinds of research and to introduce articles divided into six sections—"Mapping the Field," "Space," "Target," "Rhetoric," "Media," and "Time." The editors argue that the traditional conceptualization of satire as a literary mode (epitomized by a mandatory reference to Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal") was superseded in the 1970s by the acknowledgment of its appearance in broader contexts, such as carnival festivities. Scholars in the 1990s decisively moved from regarding satire as literary rhetoric to understanding it as a culturally situated discursive practice, a rhetoric of provocation and inquiry embedded in playful displays. Since the turn of century, investigations have encompassed more premodern examples while at the same time shifting focus from print to televisual and digital formats.

The interdisciplinary program that initiated the research presented in the collection was a reaction to the international controversy surrounding the 2006 publication in Denmark of twelve cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. In addition to PhD and postdoc projects funded by the Dutch National Research Board, essays from a conference held in 2013, "Satire Across Borders," contribute to the collection. The volume's central question: "How has the cultural impact of satire been framed and conditioned as it appears in multiple media (e.g. press, film, television, internet), in different communities (western and non-western) and different periods of time (between the age of Enlightenment and the present)?" (5). The volume's key premise: satire plays with, disturbs, contests, and challenges cultural boundaries of all sorts. The editors want to encourage further empirical research on how satire functions in particular societies, given its use of ridicule to enable critique and promote the possibility of social change.

The essays present an eclectic range of materials, both culturally and temporally. That range provides one strength of the collection but also entails very specific and somewhat obscure examples that paradoxically narrow the investigations within the focalizing categories named by the collection's sections. The essays clump together across those categories into three broad groupings: satire in Arab societies (contemporary Moroccan satire; Moroccan and Tunisian rap music videos; sitcom animations in Dubai, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia); satire in British TV (Absolutely Fabulous, Have I Got News for You, The Thick of It, and Brass Eye); and British and Dutch satire in the eighteenth century (Paul Sandby's A New Dunciad satirizing William Hogarth, two Dutch novels satirizing the monarch Willem III, John Arbuthnot's John Bull pamphlets, and a Dutch periodical of the time—Lantaarn).

Many essays in the volume accomplish recovery work for older material, in particular serialized materials otherwise not well known or available. In addition to those items already mentioned, a late nineteenth-century French periodical, L'Hydropathe, receives attention in one essay; another traces the history of the English satirical symbol of the French as frog eaters; and a third reads images from the early and later modern periods (some of them on frescoes) to chart the way that the iconography of human backs contributes to the confrontational nature of satire. (There's a joke in that last example somewhere.) Still another essay bridges such older material with the contemporary scene by examining how Spanish Golden Age satire serves as...