Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950

National Self and Non-National Other

Author: Ilkim Büke Okyar Series: Contemporary Issues in the Middle East

Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950

Examines the development of Turkish national identity from the 1908 constitutional revolution to the inclusion of Alexandretta in 1939, using the lens of contemporary political cartoons.

A nuanced and richly detailed study that

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Summary

Examines the development of Turkish national identity from the 1908 constitutional revolution to the inclusion of Alexandretta in 1939, using the lens of contemporary political cartoons.

A nuanced and richly detailed study that

Description

The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of the Other to the concept of national identity. The founding elite took up a massive project of social engineering that now required the amplification of Turkishness as the founding concept of the new nation-state. This concept was shaped by the construction of various Others as a backdrop, and for Turkey in many ways, the Arab in his keffiyeh and traditional garb constituted the ultimate Other.

In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Ilkim Büke Okyar examines the development of Turkish national identity from the 1908 constitutional revolution to the inclusion of Alexandretta in 1939, using the lens of contemporary political cartoons. Okyar brings the everyday production of nationalist discourse into the mainstream political and historical narrative of modern Turkey. In doing so, Okyar shows how the cartoon press became one of the most important agents in the construction, maintenance, and mobilization of Turkish nationalism, reinforcing a perceived image of the Arab that was haunted forever by its ethnic and religious origins.

Critic Reviews

“B”

üke Okyar has crafted a work that is not only enlightening ut also deeply vitally pertinent to grasping the intricacies of contemporary Turkish society and its identity formation.-- "Çetin Çelik, New Perspectives on Turkey"With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of independent Ara states, and the estalishment of the Turkish Repulic, the Ara emerged as the ultimate Other against whom Turkishness was defined. The author cleverly highlights this transformation through political cartoons and shows how the cartoon press made the repulican elite's nation-uilding project accessile to the uran masses. Recommended.-- "Choice"A magisterial work utilizing primary sources in the late Ottoman and early repulican periods, Okyar has written the definitive ook on the relationship etween cartoons and national identity in Ottoman and Repulican Turkey.-- "Umut Uzer, author of An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism"Okyar makes an important contriution to more standard explanations of othering under the influence of Orientalism and modern nationalism. . . This ook will resonate with the renewed attention to race in the roader scholarship and interrogations of racism in non-western societies.-- "Hasan Kayali, author of Aras and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Araism, and Islamism in the Second Constitutional Period of the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918"An original ook using Turkish political cartoons in the Ottoman Turkish press, and a variety of other sources, to show how the Aras were portrayed.-- "Feroz Ahmad, author of The Making of Modern Turkey"