The Imaginative Geographies of Emad Hajjaj’s Arab Spring Cartoons

The power of political cartoons has been examined by political geographers but rarely have non-Anglo-European cartoonists been their focus. This paper examines selected editorial cartoons of the Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj created during the Arab Spring. Specifically, we examine how they fit in the processes of constructing imaginative geographies and geographic imaginaries. More importantly, invoking Bhaba’s (2004) concept of enunciation, we demonstrate how Hajjaj’s cartoons facilitate processes that ask readers from the region to engage with cartoons that play with space in ways that recognize how colonial geographies are perpetuated and simultaneously destabilized through the blending of colonizer-colonized geographic imaginaries in various discourses. The analysis is conducted with a corpus of cartoons selected to highlight forms of cartographic practices that show how Hajjaj uses colonial understandings of the Arab World, and yet reworks them to criticize many political developments during the period.