Ethnic stereotyping and the significant other: re-imagining the Kurd in early Turkish political cartoons

This article examines about a hundred cartoons published during the decade long Kurdish insurgency in the eve of the establishment of the Republic of Turkey from 1925-1938. It attempts to assess how the relational construction between colloquial culture, the cultural construction of national characters and the state discourse are intertwined in defining the self and the other in the development of Turkish national identity. The article seeks to highlight the importance of previously neglected late Ottoman and early Republican colloquial Turkish political cartoons. This approach is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of nationalist discourse in the early Republican period, where the perceived image of the Kurd as the significant internal other is tainted forever by its supremacist origins.