Mary Gregg

In Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, the text describes its main character as witty, brave, and resourceful. The drawings of the story’s main character which accompany this text, however, present a unique kind of harm that only becomes clear when the work is read as a collection of single-panel comics rather than an illustrated book. In this chapter, I show what happens when we read drawings in books as textless comics, and, based on how things turn out from this reading, motivate why we have some substantive reason to read both Little Black Sambo and other books with drawings-as-comics.

This book argues that when visual jokes are harmful, they harm in a specific way: a subject’s personhood is revoked in a way that differs both in kind and degree depending on whether that person is depicted or described. Such revocation can occur in every role and any stage within the joke’s context, from character to audience member, from moment of depiction to uncritical exposure. Unlike a mere unhumorous insult, which doesn’t require the sympathy of its audience but can operate solely between the target and the bully, a joke requires a particular kind of response from its audience to complete itself—to “deliver”, which requires not only some degree of complicity from audience members, but a complicity earned at the expense of the joke’s referent. This book shows how we need not prevent the occurrence of these things in order to undermine their oppressive power—we only need the right kind of recontextualization: turning those utterances into jokes or turning those jokes against themselves. Unlike other forms of visual oppression, the harms contained within visual jokes can be reconfigured to affirm those they were created to harm, changing their function from jokes which attack others to jokes which attack themselves, empowering those they were created to target by calling into question the problematic conceptions of audiences who are sympathetic to the harmful joke’s initial formulation.

According to Ernst Gombrich, cartoons provide us the chance to “study the use of symbols in a circumscribed context [and] find out what role the image may play in the household of our mind” (Gombrich 1973, 190). This paper looks at some underexplored implications and outcomes of Ernst Gombrich’s conceptual schemata when such a schemata is applied to cartoons. While we might easily avoid defamatory reference when picking out a subject in writing or speech, cartoon depictions, especially those unaccompanied by speech bubbles or captions, often rely on a visual symbolism typified by the warping of some features the removal of others, and the manifestation of some visual trope or other, more easily lend themselves to defamatory reference. While harms to the referent are many in cases of defamatory cartoons, this paper focuses on the harms to the viewers of such cartoons by the depicter’s message and mode of representation, unique to the cartoon form. I will focus on the harms of misinformation of the viewer by the visual schemata (Gombrich 1960) present in certain cartoons, and the way this misinformative visual schemata (Ibid) may also restrict the possibility of conceptual revisions in its viewership. Harms of this kind come out uniquely in cartoons via norms of cartooning (as a particularly stylized and symbolic mode of visual representation) and the norms of interaction employed in the act of viewing a cartoon. As we’ll see in our case study of the infamous Jyllands Posten cartoons of Muhammad the Prophet, even in cases where a cartoon representation bears no visual similarity to its referent, viewers can easily and reliably pick out the referent by calling to mind, in our focal case, the defamatory stereotypes, stock figures and icons inextricably linked with the referent. I argue that the damage to viewers of these sorts of depictions lies not in the fact that the viewer manages to pick out the intended referent of the depiction but what tools they use to pick out the referent and how such tools of reference (mis)inform their understanding of the referent they’ve picked out.