Caricatures of cartography: geographic imaginaries in the political cartoons of Emad Hajjaj

Abstract

This thesis examines the political cartoons of Palestinian-Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj as a site for new Arab imaginative geographies. With the mapping of the Arab world an artifact of imperialism, the ability to provide cartographic counter-narratives is a powerful exercise of agency for the subaltern. I build the case for Hajjaj’s political cartoons as such a site for discursive agency in three chapters: The first positions the research in the larger field of the critical geopolitics in addition to the sub-field of popular geopolitics. Specifically, I outline the concept of intertextuality as it is used in critical geopolitics and its application to pieces of popular media and culture, such as political cartoons, creating popular geopolitics. In the second, I leverage theories of satire and humor hinging on requisite (or presupposed) knowledge in the form of “common sense” geopolitical imaginaries. By examining these contexts necessary for the understanding of the satire in the cartoon, we are able to capture the ways in which Hajjaj’s imaginative geographies capture popular tropes to subvert them, a process referred to as enunciation. The corpus analyzed comprises cartoons from 2011-2014 wherein Hajjaj uses maps or other cartographic elements to make his point. Hajjaj’s use of maps clustered around several themes, most notably his acts of “playing with space” wherein he rearranged Arab world states into creative new configurations beyond strict physical borders. The final chapter expands upon the findings and positions the research in terms of my contribution to scholarship in popular geopolitics, concluding that the imaginative geographies presented are hybrids, drawing from established imaginaries that are filtered through Hajjaj’s flair for satire to enunciate distinctly Arab counter-geographies, exercising the agency to map that has historically been denied to Arabs.