Just Clowning: Employing Political Cartoons as Pedagogical Counter-Discourse

Just Clowning: Political Cartoons as Pedagogical Counter-Discourse David W. Kupferman University of Hawaiʻi-West Oʻahu Abstract This paper considers the use of political cartoons as a pedagogical tool in the social studies classroom in such a way as to provide a counter-discourse to prevailing notions of learning about the “other,” employ and legitimate indigenous epistemologies, and

challenge both normative values implicit in educational measurement as well as the benevolence of neo-liberal economic “development” in non-western societies. In order to do so, I “read” one-panel political cartoons as part of the curriculum in a social studies methods course. The use of these political cartoons provides social studies students and teachers a window into epistemologies and ways of constructing reality. In addition, this paper attempts to open up an alternative space in which these political cartoons can be read as heuristics of cultural critique and as a minor literature, by interweaving Lyotard’s ethical notion of just gaming, Bergson’s conception of the comic as productive, and the Pacific Islander custom of clowning, in which social norms and assumptions are actively inverted. The theoretical framework of this paper employs the interlocution of Jean- François Lyotard’s (1985) notion of ethical imagination and Henri Bergson’s (2005) analysis of humor and the comic as productive modes of being with the practice of clowning as social criticism among Pacific Islander communities. In this way, I am exploring the productive qualities of clowning as pedagogical discourse and counter- discourse, in the first instance so that we may trace the ways that Lyotard argues imagination “is not only an ability to judge; it is a power to invent criteria” (p. 17) – and by extension, criteria of legitimation and assessment; and in the second, to examine what Bergson means by a comic that “makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought to be” (p. 9). For Lyotard, creativity is rooted in forms of knowing that are not ontological, and therefore prescriptive, but rather in justice, in what Nuyen (1998) names “imaginative knowledge.” It is through imagination, and importantly play, that spaces can be created in which alternative conceptions of ethics, justice, and ways of being upend what are otherwise normalized and non-contingent sets of “real” knowledge. This notion of ethical play and gaming, which is seemingly commented on by Bergson (albeit seventy years before Lyotard), suggests that the comic in a variety of contexts allows for the problematization of discourses in what are ostensibly socially acceptable, and therefore conservative, ways; yet it is this notion of comedy as a game that produces the possibility of inversion, not of critiques that are inherently conservative, but rather that are subversive, as it is this rewriting of the rules through the comic that presents the most formidable challenge to the social imaginary. References Bergson, H. (2005). Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic. Mineola, NY: Dover. (Original work published 1911) Lyotard, J-F, & Thébaud, J-L. (1985). Just gaming (W. Godzich, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nuyen, A. T. (1998). Jean-François Lyotard: Education for imaginative knowledge. In M. Peters (Ed.), Naming the multiple: Poststructuralism and education (pp. 173182). Westport: Bergin and Garvey.