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Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 7:2 (2017) ► pp.235–251

From metaphor to allegory

The Japanese manga Afuganisu-tan

| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam

Afuganisu-tan is an online manga by Timaking, published in English online in 2005, that presents selected historical events of modern Afghanistan in a series of 29 episodes plus an appendix. An episode consists of a four-panel micro-narrative in which Afghanistan and the countries with which its history is intertwined are consistently personified as young girls. Each manga episode is accompanied by a short, textual ‘memo’ describing historical events in a neutral, factual way. In this paper, we (1) propose that the extended personification of Afghanistan and other countries in this manga can be understood in terms of ‘allegory’; (2) sketch and evaluate how the manga part affects the construal of the country’s history; (3) consider some of the consequences of combining the manga part with memo text for the informative and educational value of Afuganisu-tan.

Keywords: manga, word & image relations, personification, extended metaphor, allegory, narrativization of history
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Afuganisu-tan: Layout and style
  • 3.Personification in Afuganisu-tan
  • 4.From personification to allegory
  • 5. Afuganisu-tan as allegory: implications
    • The age and gender of the protagonists
    • Terrorists as stray cats
    • Politics as a game
    • Lack of specificity of the allegorical form
  • 6.Interactions between manga and memo
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 20 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.7.2.04cor
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