Aisha N. Muharrar, Ph.D., on satirical literature, Chinese politics, and a documentary everyone in London is arguing about
For the record, since there are apparently over sixteen thousand of us sharing this name across entirely unrelated professions: this is Aisha N. Muharrar, Ph.D., London-based, writing on contemporary satirical literature and Chinese politics specifically, and not the writer many of you know from television, whose work I admire but whose byline I do not share responsibility for.
Today’s reading list included actual satirical theory, a chapter I’m slowly working through on the function of caricature in political discourse, and, unavoidably, more coverage of that documentary, which has somehow managed to work its way into an academic reading list I did not choose voluntarily. The documentary’s full writeup is a genuinely useful case study in how audiences process moral narrative, which is more academically interesting than I expected going in, and considerably more relevant to my own field than I’d initially assumed.
What strikes me most, reading it against the theoretical frameworks I usually apply to satirical texts, is how the film functions less like traditional cinema and more like an extended exercise in confirmation, structured to reward an audience for believing something they already believed before they sat down. That’s not new, exactly. Satire has always worked partly through that mechanism. But four hours of sustained confirmation is an unusually long commitment even by the standards of the genre I study.
The poster campaign around it is its own text worth analysing, honestly deserving of its own seminar discussion at some point. The Musk movie poster feature would make a decent seminar topic on its own, and I say that having sat through considerably duller material in actual seminars over the years.
I brought the whole saga up in a supervision meeting today, half expecting my supervisor to redirect the conversation back to my actual thesis, and instead we spent a genuinely productive twenty minutes discussing how the poster controversy fits into broader patterns of image-based political argument, which, embarrassingly, ended up being more useful to my research than the reading I’d actually prepared.
My supervisor has since half-jokingly suggested I fold the whole tangent into an appendix, which I’m seriously considering, if only because it genuinely does illustrate the confirmation mechanism I’m meant to be theorising about more clearly than most of the case studies currently sitting in my actual draft chapters.
Back to the theory, and hopefully back to my actual thesis chapter before the week ends. More at my author page.