Mark Knight vs Serena Williams -- Crossing the Line: Offensive and Controversial Cartoons in the 21st Century -- "The View from Australia" -- Part Two

Abstract

Given the vagaries of the 24-hour_news cycle, by the time you read this, the furor surrounding Mark Knight's cartoon of Serena Williams (Fig. 1) will have died-down. The Australian and international media have moved on; and Williams herself has refused to be drawn on the issue (Blair, 2018). Yet, it deserves to be remembered, not just as an incident of historical importance in cartoon terms. Knight may have intended the cartoon for a purely Australian audience -- or even a narrower one, based in the city of Melbourne, the capital of Australia's second most populous state, Victoria. But in keeping with the new trend towards a global, transnational, and completely borderless context for cartooning (Scully, 2015), and owing largely to the "current configuration of digital media" (Phiddian, 2018), it soon became a world-wide news story, comparable to the Jyllands-Posten controversy of 2005, or Sean Delonas's chimpanzee/Obama cartoon in the New York Post (2009). Partisans in the debate over the cartoon sought to bolster their positions through reference to significant notions of press freedom, freedom of speech, civil rights, and equal opportunity protections under law. Accusations not only of racism, but of sexism were also carried over from broader debate over the original incident, in which Williams argued vociferously with the chair umpire in her U.S. Open loss to Naomi Osaka (King, 2018). In artistic terms, Knight and many of his fellow cartoonists (Brown, 2018a), defended the cartoon on the basis of verisimilitude: Serena Williams is "a giant, aggressive AfroAmerican with a shock of wild hair and a tutu," and the cartoon contained elements of legitimate caricature. Others rejected this, arguing that Knight did not depict Williams in recognizable style at all (McLaughlin, 2018), and in so doing had been lazy, and produced at best a "bad" cartoon. Almost inevitably, those taking sides fell to one side or the other of the conservative/ progressive divide that has characterized Australian and world press culture for decades; which is also characterized by division between multinational media empire News Corp and its competitors (in Australia, primarily Fairfax Media). Unravelling these complex debates reveals much about the shape of cartooning in the early 21st Century.