Crossing the Line: Offensive and Controversial Cartoons in the 21st-Century -- "The View from Australia"

Abstract

Despite being now only 15 years old, the 21st Century has already proven to be a new era for political cartooning, in more ways than one. While I've argued elsewhere (and uncontroversially) that the new age of modern political cartooning begins with the Internet (Scully, 2014a), if I were to lower my eyes to establish a more recent historical epoch, it would be the publication of the infamous "Mohammed cartoons" in the Danish newspaper 'Jyllands-Posten' in September 2005 (Various cartoonists). While the cartoons published therein were extremely controversial, dating the beginning of the present era to that episode is hardly so.