Asian Punches

Book excerpt: This book deals with Punches and Punch-like magazines in 19th and 20th century Asia, covering an area from Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the West via British India up to China and Japan in the East. It traces an alternative and largely unacknowledged side of the history of this popular British periodical, and simultaneously casts a wide-reaching comparative glance on the genesis of satirical journalism in various Asian countries. Demonstrating the spread of both textual and visual satire, it is an apt demonstration of the transcultural trajectory of a format intimately linked to media-bound public spheres evolving in the period concerned.