Oldal 109 [109]
OCR
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 nineteenth 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 organized and communicated proceed[ing] from the received cultural scheme” and continuously reproduce its cultural codes (Sahlins 1987: 151-152). These concepts 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 cartooning 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 Martin 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 constructing knowledge, and the way people act and react is linked to a way of thinking 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 imagination 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. 107
