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 Bueke 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.
Ilkim Bueke Okyar is associate professor in political science and International Relations at Yeditepe University.
By placing ethnicity at the center, the book focuses on the stereotyping of Arabs from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century within the nationalist discourse in late Ottoman and early republican Turkey.
Bueke Okyar has crafted a work that is not only enlightening but also deeply vitally pertinent to grasping the intricacies of contemporary Turkish society and its identity formation.-- "Cetin Celik, New Perspectives on Turkey" With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of independent Arab states, and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Arab 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 republican elite's nation-building project accessible to the urban masses. Recommended.-- "Choice" A magisterial work utilizing primary sources in the late Ottoman and early republican periods, Okyar has written the definitive book on the relationship between cartoons and national identity in Ottoman and Republican Turkey.-- "Umut Uzer, author of An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism" Okyar makes an important contribution to more standard explanations of othering under the influence of Orientalism and modern nationalism. . . This book will resonate with the renewed attention to race in the broader scholarship and interrogations of racism in non-western societies.-- "Hasan Kayali, author of Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Second Constitutional Period of the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918" An original book using Turkish political cartoons in the Ottoman Turkish press, and a variety of other sources, to show how the Arabs were portrayed.-- "Feroz Ahmad, author of The Making of Modern Turkey"
