When Satire Speaks: MCDA and the Politics of Visual Resistance in Khartoon! Magazine

Abstract

This thesis explores how the political caricatures in Khartoon! magazine interpret the ongoing Sudanese war through multimodal design and ideological framing. The theoretical premise underlying this paper is that political caricature can be considered citizen political discourse; thus, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) has been used to examine how the visual and verbal semiotic resources within the caricatures function together to create critique, assign responsibility, and frame audience perceptions. A sample of eight caricatures from Khartoon! was analyzed using Machin and Mayr's (2012) MCDA framework and grouped into three thematic categories: Foreign Interference, RSF and Urgency, and Satire and Ridicule of Leaders. The analysis focused on iconography, attributes, settings, salience (size, color, tone/brightness, focus, and foreground), and visual semiotic resources (gaze and pose). Findings demonstrate that Khartoon! employs a consistent use of multimodal strategies to convey its narrative of the war (such as symbolic condensation, visual metaphor, satire), and that salience is employed as an ideological device that determines what aspects of the war receive most attention, who is responsible, and which aspects are of great urgency. Through consistent use of recognizable visual representations, the actors involved in the conflict, including perpetrators, victims, and complicit external actors, have been differentiated. Each of the three themes emphasizes a specific aspect of the war (foreign patronage, military violence, and satire), and although the caricatures focus on these distinct aspects, they all share a common critical view that seeks to de-naturalize dominant discourses surrounding the war and resist the process of erasure. This research adds to the existing literature on multimodal political discourse by offering a multidisciplinary approach to applying MCDA to wartime caricature within a Sudan-centric framework and providing evidence of the utility of visual semiotics for understanding cross-cultural circulation in contemporary media environments. Future research in this area could include reception analysis, a linear or comparative design, and/or a larger sample size.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science