Visual metaphor and authoritarianism in Serbian political cartoons

Abstract

This article examines how political cartoons reflected and mobilized resistance to growing authoritarianism and the personalization of power in contemporary Serbia. The focus is on the work of Dušan Petričić, the most influential political cartoonist in Serbia, which was published in daily Politika and weekly NIN between 2012 and 2017. Petričić’s cartoons offer interesting insights into a dramatic decline of press freedom and the rise of authoritarian personalist rule in terms of both their content and political impact. The authors draw on quantitative content analysis and qualitative multimodal analysis to examine the key representational and stylistic features of Petričić’s cartoons, both as a way to understand the relationship between his aesthetics and his political statements, and in order to critically assess some of the ways in which democratization conflicts may be expressed visually. Their analysis also draws on evidence from an in-depth interview with the author. In combining a systematic analysis of key visual patterns across a sample of cartoons with a comprehensive evaluation of how both visual and linguistic features work together to promote anti-authoritarian ideals and resistance, the article offers a framework to understand the political import of aesthetics in Serbia’s democratization process.