Getting an edge in wordwise: The social and productive role of political oratory and cartooning in Malagasy democratic political process

This dissertation concerns the use and interplay of two forms of public speaking and verbal mass-mediated performance in urban Madagascar as they reflect and shape shifting dynamics of political engagement and emerging modes of public participation in national democratic process. The two forms are oratory and political cartoons, known in Madagascar as kabary politika and kisarisary politika, respectively. Through investigations of these everyday modes of communicative interaction between orators and cartoonists, this dissertation look to the ways in which their media---as vehicles of rhetoric and information, and as means for enacting public identities and shaping participant roles---mediate institutional change and serve as new forms of local political representation. The dissertation follows the ethnography of these issues with an eye to the ways in which language ideologies and aesthetics shape the structures and practical effects of modern Malagasy political speech and cartooning as locally experienced but inculcated in larger social processes of a global modernity.;The project attempts to explore and clarify three important issues to which the interplay of these two speech genres speak: (1) it explores local folk theories of signs to determine the extent to which language---from its structure to style---serves as an index of culturally-situated modes of political representation and agency that shape and reflect participant roles. (2) It looks to the role of language and shifting fashions of speaking in the production and negotiation of idioms mediating social relations, especially those burgeoning at fluid boundaries between state and civil society. Within this, the dissertation examines the syntax, register, and contextual variations across genres of public political performance as means to affect public opinion and notions of political community solidarity. (3) Lastly, the project engages in understanding the ways in which social actors metapragmatically argue truth in representation through their genres. Following the daily mediated interactions between orators and cartoonists, the dissertation examines how the trope of 'development' has served as an idiom or charter for state moral imperatives to define and discipline the boundaries, and therefore social acts, between what constitutes communicative acts of truth and falsity, often addressed as 'transparency' and 'corruption'.