ANALYZING CARICATURES AS A MEDIUM OF REVEALING POLITICAL AGENDAS: A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The trend of political caricatures has been recently prospered in Pakistan. Media has demonstrated the caricatures with sarcastic and humorous pictures to deride the political parties with an expectation of advancement. In any case, these cartoons are especially persuasive for individuals and a source of amusement. Caricatures are composed of metaphor, irony, satire and exaggeration. Their purpose is to let the viewers aware of various political agendas and happenings. The paper illustrates how political caricatures are used as a vehicle to reveal the political agendas in the Pakistani Newspapers using multimodal discourse analysis of Kress and Leeuwen (2006) under systemic functional perspective. Caricatures were selected from two mainstream newspapers “The Nation” and “The Daily Times”. This paper has shown how caricatures are utilized to fulfill communicative tasks in Pakistani print media and how the caricatures are innovatively used to set political agenda in this way providing political interpretation and debate in humorous way through which political realities are mirrored in the nation’s wider socio-political ground.