The Foretold Story of the Arab Other in Turkish Political Cartoons

By placing ethnicity at the center, this talk focuses on the stereotyping of Arabs by the Ottoman intelligentsia, first and later by the populizers of the Turkish state discourse from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Tracing the transformation of the Arab stereotype over a long durée, the talk considers how these stereotypes were reproduced in the nationalist discourse of the late Ottoman and early republican Turkey in the making of the non-national “other” and how these stereotypes that stick to our imagination resurface once we encounter them in the flux of global events such as forced migration.

Ilkim Büke Okyar is associate professor in Political Science and International Relations at Yeditepe University. Buke Okyar studies nationalism and national identities in the Middle East and early republican era in Turkey. She received her PhD degree from Ben-Gurion University in Israel and received Chaim Herzog Award for best dissertation.