Mostafa Houssien’s Satan’s Family

Abstract

After the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, the Egyptian media launched strenuous campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood and the West. In this paper, I present a cognitive analysis of a multimodal text of a cartoon with labels, with the goal of gauging its social/political impact. Crucially, the cartoon ‘frames’ its message so strongly that even if the viewer is not a speaker of Arabic and all verbal elements in the cartoon are to be erased, he or she (with certain ‘general’ background knowledge) will probably be able to read its moral message. For the analysis, I employ Fauconnier and Turner’s (1998) conceptual blending theory. The analysis shows that metaphoric blends do not just surface in public discourse. Rather, they can have a strong influence on how people perceive political issues.