Oldal 109 [109]
The Arab Other in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1908—1939
of the Turkish elite towards Arabs were melded by the heroic Arab resistance to
the colonial powers in north Africa and by their betrayal of the Ottomans in the
Middle East. These grievances, embedded in the Ottoman collective memory,
found manifestation in every possible discourse, including the cartoon space.
The nature and intensity of this transition call for investigation of the myriad
ideas that blossomed during the years preceding and following the collapse of 1918.
‘The present study is focused, however, on the production of the image of Arabs
during the transition of the empire to nation. It will examine how one of the most
prominent sectors of the new post-Ottoman Turkish intellectual elite, cartoonists,
refashioned stereotypical images of the Arab in the context of the emerging Turkish
national identity.
The dissolution of the empire brought with it new frameworks of identification.
‘The pronationalist reformist group known as Kemalists—which included military
officers, bureaucrats, journalists, and intellectuals—shaped and coordinated the
national resistance that eventually led to the creation of the Turkish Republic. The
Kemalist elite took up a massive project of social engineering, which was part and
parcel of the establishment of the new republic. It required the amplification of
Turkishness, rendering it the founding concept of the new nation-state, an effort
that had been initiated within the Ottoman Reformist movement of the late nine¬
teenth century. Akin to other projects of nation formation, the definition of the
Turkish nation was shaped by, among other things, the construction of various
Others, and in many ways, the Arabs in their keffiyeh and garb constituted the
ultimate Other.
Perceptions are transferred through “the concepts by which experience is or¬
ganized and communicated proceed[ing] from the received cultural scheme” and
continuously reproduce its cultural codes (Sahlins 1987: 151-152). These con¬
cepts are manifested in different kinds of discourses, including graphic or visual
discourse, where symbolic forms of representation have repeatedly produced the
cultural codes. Among the available means of graphic persuasion, political cartoon¬
ing has been a powerful one ever since it was employed as part of news commentary
in early nineteenth century Europe. Both the volume edited by Charles A. Hill
and Marguerite Helmers (Hill & Helmers 2012) and the taxonomic study of Mar¬
tin J. Medhurst and Michael A. De Sousa provide powerful illustrations of the
important role played by political cartoons in establishing the connection between
visual images and persuasion (Medhurst & DeSousa 1981). As Foucault argued
and Rajchman commented, the “art of seeing” constitutes an essential part of con¬
structing knowledge, and the way people act and react is linked to a way of think¬
ing where thinking is related to the transferred cultural codes (Rajchman 1988).’
" Visual rhetoric developed in political cartoons as the representation of a certain time in one’s imagina¬
tion of the given moment in history holds the power to carry a certain form of knowledge which become
instrumentalized in the construction of public’s mind.
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