Q: How did you choose the topic of your research?
Alotaibi: So, my dissertation, it’s basically the same idea, but on a bigger scale. I’m doing my dissertation on the same political cartoon representation of Arabs and Muslims, but I’m looking from the start of the relationship, which is the 1940s until 2020, so I have [a lot of] data that I’m dealing with.
So, it was the first class in my Ph.D., it was a history class, and in that class, Dr. [Edgar] Simpson, the director of the communication school here at [The University of Southern Mississippi], and Dr. [David] Davies, who is my advisor, were both teaching that class at the same time, which is really interesting. So, in that class it was required for us to do a paper that related to history and communication at the same time. So, I was like, ‘Huh, what should I do?’ But I was, at the same time, talking with my family and reading more about the oil crisis in the 70s, because I just found it interesting how the old stereotypes kind of picked the perspective of the readers across time.
So, I was looking at that, and then I said, ‘I want to do the coverage of the oil crisis at that time. That was the plan at that time. But after, I said, ‘What kind of coverage am I looking at? Newspaper? Am I looking at broadcast? Am I looking at magazines, TV? So, I was like, ‘Which one should I do?’ And it was difficult, because you know, it’s a lot of history. And no primary data available at that time related to the things that I want to do. So, I was struggling in that area until one day one of the professors told me, ‘What about political cartoons?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, why not? But where can I find them?’ And he told me, ‘Good luck. It’s microfilm.’ So, I said, ‘Microfilm, I will try to do it.’ I did spend like a month, basically, in the library. Spending the whole time here doing the microfilm and seeking page by page through a couple of big newspapers. I did that, and I also found a couple of archives online. I collected from there as well.
And I did that paper. I liked it, and I said about three years ago, even though it’s not 100% related to my interest, which is not history. I’m more about representation, I look at the modern data about the new day’s events, something like that. But, when I [looked at] the political cartoons, I found there’s a big gap. No one did that before. And I found in my environment, next to me, many people got excited about that topic. So, I said, ‘Let me finish it. Finish this book,’ which is, I’m basically doing a book for my dissertation, which is related to the political cartoon, and that’s going to be [covering] seventy years. And that is the reason why I decided to do it.
Q: Are political cartoons still used as prominently as they were in the 1970s?
Alotaibi: Yes. I think they’re still using it, but it’s not as famous as it used to be. But I found it shifted a little bit from political cartoons to be more about memes. At the same time, with memes, anyone can post them. So, it’s a little bit different than the political cartoon that’s got the agenda and the cartoonist who is drawing them.
Q: So, the use of political cartoons died down, and now in the internet era, there’s a resurgence of images or political cartoons through the form of memes?
Alotaibi: Yeah, it still exists on the internet. It’s still containing the same stereotypes that we saw before in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, similar themes, most of the time negative, about Gulf state people and Arabs and Muslims.
Q: What makes political cartoons an effective and unique method of communication?
Alotaibi: I believe visual elements are stronger than words, a thousand times stronger than words. And most of the time we build our knowledge about different people, different culture, different things that we do not have enough knowledge about just from these political cartoons. From these specific visual media elements, we build our knowledge based on that.
Most of the time this will result—according to my analysis of the political cartoon—in adapting a kind of biased perspective about the event, about the people, about the culture, especially if it’s repeated more than once. And actually, if it’s also repeated by more than one cartoonist, we will believe this is the normal thing, that it is right about the event, about the people, about whatever elements are in that cartoon.
Q: Are political cartoons still useful communication tools, or are they mostly used to further negative stereotypes and narratives?
Alotaibi: I believe if we did not talk about political cartoons with a specific name, so if we say images or if we said visual elements that contain messages that we see around social media, so it doesn’t need to be political cartoons. So, I’m arguing that political cartoons can reinforce and create stereotypes, but also images can do the same thing. So, after I’m doing the analysis, I will see if the number of cartoons [has gone down] in recent years because I’m doing from the 40s or the 50s into the 2020s. I did so far finish five chapters, and the biggest chapter was the oil crisis, because in that ten years, there were like three or maybe two big events about the oil crisis. So, in that year, the number of political cartoons just jumped way too much. In that chapter, I have 200 something cartoons, and the ten years before that, it was just thirty-nine cartoons, and the ten years after that, just 100 or so cartoons.
So, I’m arguing, based on the data that I found in my dissertation, that the oil crisis, it’s the peak for the cartoonist who separated many stereotypes, reinforcing these stereotypes from the old kind of traditional media. Let’s talk about Hollywood, for example, or any other kind of media that had the same representation of Arabs and Muslims. So, these cartoons during the oil crisis, in ten years’ time, the 70s, started using these kinds of stereotypes, reinforcing them again. And that is my opinion about how maybe the American people—because I’m doing specifically just American cartoonists—kind of see the Middle East or the Gulf states, and their perspective according to traditional media, and one of them is political cartoons.
Q: Are there any residual effects we see today from the surge of political cartoons during the 1970s oil crisis?
Alotaibi: I think the biggest effect [was people] building their knowledge about other people based on one perspective, [that of] the cartoonist, and that will result in having a generation that deeply depended on newspapers to have a kind of bias perspective or kind of racist thoughts based on these visual elements about the community, about the events, about the people presented in the cartoons. So the effects, it kind of goes beyond what we know from the literature, because basically, there is no 100 percent of evidence that political cartoons can do this or that. But there is much evidence that any kind of visual elements will affect how we see the world if we don’t have enough knowledge about a specific thing that we got from the political cartoons.