Visual mode

The paper aims at tracing the elements of state-people power relation discourse in contemporary Iranian political cartoons featured in Khatkhati Satirical Magazine between March 2018 and March 2019. It addresses a gap in the research of Iranian caricature as a multimodal media and employs visual social semiotic framework (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) to analyze 6 cartoons representing the power relation in question. The interaction between image and text, as well as semiotic resources realizing the representational, interactive and compositional metafunctions of the visual mode are carefully examined to decode the messages communicated by the cartoons. The analysis tentatively suggests the following motifs inferred from the analyzed cartoons: dichotomy between the officials and regular people, abuse of power and  the subordinates’ trust by the dominant actor, corruption and hypocrisy underlining the state-people power relation.