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Conferencia “Aping cultures: stereotype and difference in the genre of the political cartoon”, Universiteit van Amsterdam, marzo 2, 18 hrs.

Profesor Bernard McGuirk

In seeking to account for an Anglo-Saxon “embrace” of Jacques Derrida – that has often been firmer even than in Francophone milieu – it is pertinent to stress the attraction of his rehabilitation of the ever-looming spectres of politics within the times and spaces of any and all structurations; in the hauntings of Marx, for example, by Hamlet. “The time is out of joint”, already, always, and also in the political cartoon: the image and the icon, too. At play in the analysis will be the grammar of cliché qua truism, whenever instant recognisability is enlisted by the cartoonist, whose iconography is often supplemented by captions. A supplementarity of images alone might and can work; but lexical support is available in the labels, bubbles and quotations not just of words but rather, in this genre most overtly, of Derrida’s “les animots”. In pursuing possibly risky, fabulous or chimerical responses to the question “But me, who am I”, it will become apparent that, in the to-ing and fro-ing between images and words, between metaphors and metonyms, the cartoonist, too, deploys a close but radically foreign grammar. The plurality of relations explored in the creative act of othering the other, often in rendering it abject, will habitually involve the absorption of a simultaneously othered, even abject, self. Rarely is that risk more overtly run than in the caricatural projection of war.

The animotions traced first will be those of the South Atlantic, notably in pursuit of albatross and penguin effects of the 1982 Malvinas-Falklands conflict and its continuing legacy in a present era of renewed speculation on the oil deposits and fisheries riches still sought after by an ever-acquisitive United Kingdom in the face of a toned down but sporadically drum-and-breast beating Argentina. I shall wish to echo, in transference, the basic rhythms of that analysis as a prompt to move, secondly, via further and different animotions, to an evocation of a contemporarily cartooned Italy within an international arena of caricatural political relations with the EU and the USA. The interrogative “But me, who am I?” will be conceived inseparably from another, sovereign query: “But he, who is he?.  Thereby, sign-readers or decipherers will also have had to pass through a cartoon game of their own; of hide in order to seek; of smile in order not to speak the name of a markedly biographical animot. If, d’après Roland Barthes, “to read is to struggle to name”, to caricature – by contrast – will be shown to border, to draw on, even to echo the burlesque

El profesor McGuirk lleva a cabo su labor docente (literatura espan0la contemporánea) en la Universidad de Nottingham.

Su conferencia (en inglés) tendrá lugar en la UB Singel (Singel 425, Belle van Zuylenzaal, Universiteit van Amsterdam), el miércoles 2 de marzo, de las 6pm a las 8pm, en Amsterdam.