Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art ed. by Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava (review)

Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art abounds in transnational support for its premise that editorial cartooning developed through imperialism, which not only prompted satirical art but also circulated its political vocabulary. Most of the authors in this collection of fourteen essays share editors' Richard Scully and Andrekos Varnava's background as Australian specialists in European history, so the British Empire garners the most attention, with essays devoted to graphic commentary on colonization in India, Cyprus, Egypt, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. A few non-European scholars analyze satires of events in other empires—the Sino-Japanese War, the Ottoman-Armenian massacres, and US western expansion—to supplement European takes on the second German Reich and American imperialism abroad. This review concentrates on the six chapters (about half the volume) of most relevance to Studies in American Humor readers; without exception, these essays are thoroughly researched and documented, authoritatively argued, and well supported by full- and half-page illustrations.

As its title suggests, the editors' introduction, "The Importance of Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art in Imperial Contexts" (1–30), aims mainly to advocate for taking graphic humor seriously both as historical documentation of cultural attitudes and as a product of material culture. Scholars of print humor already take for granted that popular periodicals producing and circulating political satire belong to social, economic, and ideological systems that shape their content along with their readership, but StAH readers new to comics scholarship will nonetheless appreciate Scully and Varnava's recap of how print cartoons gained respectability both as a communicative medium and as historical evidence. More central to the volume's goal, however, is the editors' argument that graphic satire is, contrary to popular views of satire's subversiveness, "inherently imperial" (10), because the content and representational conventions of political cartoons circulated throughout the British Empire in concert with the settler colonialism that advanced it. The editors trace how print publications played a role in this process, with Punch, or, the London Charivari (1841–1992) as the model, by exporting techniques of graphic humor along with the political ideas they embodied from metropolitan centers to their colonies. (Punch also receives close attention in chapters across the volume.) Though the introduction notes some colonial and postcolonial instances of this process in North America as well as in the UK, Australasia, and South Africa, Americanists will find more that is relevant to the field in Scully's earlier studies of these transnational influences. There he provides especially significant details of Anglo-American exchange in analyzing international uptake of satiric art by William Hogarth and others in the eighteenth century, and by his successors in nineteenth-century humor magazines such as Punch, Puck, and Judge. ¹

Chapters 3 through 5 have the most relevance for specialists in American humor. All four chapters in part I, "High Imperialism and Colonialism," also provide useful models for analyzing editorial cartoons, including Robert Dingley and Scully's careful delineations among allegory, metaphor, and caricature as representational techniques in chapter 2, "Courting the Colonies: Linley Sambourne, Punch , and Imperial Allegory" (31–65). Dingley and Scully give welcome attention to conventions of depicting (potential) colonists as sexualized female objects of male imperial desire, noting that "the recurrent allegory of empire as a form of sexual encounter should never be read simply as a symbolic trope: all too often, the fantasy of erotic conquest was acted out literally and tragically during western man's penetration of the 'dark places of the earth'" (61). The influence of Punch throughout the English-speaking world calls for further explorations of its uptake by comic artists on this side of the pond.

In chapter 3, "'Master Jonathan' in Cuba: A Case Study in Colonial Bildungskarikatur" (66–91), Albert D. Pionke and Frederick Whiting trace characterizations of Brother Jonathan, the quintessential Yankee of American folklore, as John Bull's vulgar, rambunctious kid brother whose...