{"id":12853,"date":"2011-12-03T10:01:10","date_gmt":"2011-12-03T06:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=12853"},"modified":"2011-12-04T18:56:29","modified_gmt":"2011-12-04T14:56:29","slug":"bahrain-three-cartoonists-sum-bigger-than-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/middle-east-art\/bahrain-three-cartoonists-sum-bigger-than-parts\/","title":{"rendered":"Bahrain: 3 Cartoonists, Sum Bigger than Parts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>At the intersection of creative appropriation, translation, cartooning, and journalism, Josh Neufeld creates his \u201cBahrain: Lines in the Sand<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neufeld wasn\u2019t in Bahrain during the recent protests<\/a> that were violently put down with help from Saudi and UAE soldiers, but he cartoons about them nonetheless. How? Through the lens of two emerging cartoonists he met while visiting the nation in 2010: \u201cSara\u201d and \u201cMohammed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neufeld begins his narrative with his 2010 trip, after which he was Facebook-friended by Sara and Mohammed. He later interacted with them (digitally) during the uprising in Bahrain.<\/p>\n

So far, a pretty thin claim to expertise.<\/p>\n

But Neufeld\u2019s \u201cSara\u201d and \u201cMohammed\u201d are both, like him, graphic artists. More specifically, they are graphic artists who are actively telling their nation\u2019s story. When Neufeld re-shapes the Bahrain narrative as his own, he embeds their very different work (Mohammed is a protester; Sara is pro-government)\u00a0within his.<\/p>\n

Cartoon Movement<\/a> editor and cartoonist Matt Bors, who commissioned the work, told the Washington Post<\/em><\/a>, \u201cI like the way Josh incorporates the real cartoons of Mohammed and Sara and their opinions without judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Neufeld\u2019s narrative is certainly not without judgement (is such a thing even possible?). In the last frames that include Sara, her face changes into something sharper and uglier than it was in the opening frames. And it ends with the far more sympathetically drawn Mohammed saying, \u201cOf course I am Shia and I am proud.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting here, of course, is not Neufeld\u2019s alleged even-handedness, but how he uses\u2014and translates (see above)\u2014Sara and Mohammed\u2019s work, embedding it into his own.<\/p>\n

See it yourself.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks to Bint Battuta<\/a> for sharing this. If you don\u2019t follow BB on Twitter<\/a>, perhaps you should.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M.LYNX-QUALEY: Neufeld wasn\u2019t in Bahrain during the protests, but he cartoons about it nevertheless through the lens of two cartoonists who were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":12854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,136,83,80],"tags":[18303,39,3091,2627,162],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}