Political Oratory and Cartooning: Ethnography of Democratic Processes in Madagascar by Jennifer Jackson. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. pp. viii + 257 pp

In this innovative ethnography of the public sphere in contemporary urban Madagascar, Jennifer Jackson explores the forms of collective political subjectivity, or “publics,” emerging from the interplay of two distinct and yet profoundly connected discursive genres: political oratory (kabary politika) and cartooning (kisarisary politika). While the former received consid- erable previous ethnographic consideration (for example, work by Maurice Bloch, Lee Haring, and Elinor Ochs), little research has so far been done on the latter. Thus, besides offering a valuable historical and ethnographic insight into Madagascar’s overlooked tradi- tion of political cartooning, this book has the great merit of exploring the complex intertextual and multimodal dynamics between oratory and cartooning. Drawing on field- work undertaken during the first decade of the new millennium, at a time of major political transformations in Madagascar, Jackson documents how these two genres intersect with transnational global discourses. The relation between oratory and cartooning unfolds in a play of mimetic allusions, parodic criticism, and hidden references generative of hermeneutic acts through which collective political subjects emerge and become aware of their existence in the public sphere.