Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911 by Palmira Brummett Review by: Elizabeth Thompson International

Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 2002), pp. 146-148 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3880179 . Accessed: 28/10/2011 07:06
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of the largerZionist labor movement as a nationalist-colonial-cum-socialist enterprise,and how it defined itself (often througha good deal of cognitive dissonance)throughits imaginationand representationsof Arab workers. At the same time, Bernstein'sfocus on the more exclusionist results in the labor marketreveals how that ambivalencewas resolved on the ground. With detailed tables and charts compiled through archival sources and discussions of Arab as well as Jewish industriesin Haifa, Bernstein has done a great service for scholars working on the inter-wareconomy of Palestine. Arab workers "did not want to construct boundaries" (p. 207), she explains. The problem was that such boundarieswere in the vested interestof the Jewish workers-or, at least, their leaders in the organizedZionist labor movement. Indeed, as she argues in her conclusion-rightly, I would say-fifty-odd years after the establishmentof Israel as a Jewish state, the legacy of the Mandatoryperiodmust be consideredin any pathology of why joint action and solidarity between the two communitiesremains illusive. PALMIRA BRUMMETT, Image and Imperialismin the OttomanRevolutionaryPress, 1908-1911 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Pp. 489. $86.50 cloth, $29.95 paper. REVIEWED ELIZABETH BY THOMPSON, Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville The reader plunges into the whirlwind of revolution in this study of the satirical press that circulated after the Young Turks reinstatedthe Ottomanconstitution in 1908. The brave new world depicted in the more than one hundred cartoons reprintedin this work is headed in unknownand often paradoxicaldirections:we see starvingpeasantsconfrontfur-coatedrevolutionaries;dragon-headeddespots leading Lady Liberty by the arm; cadaverouscholera victims patrolling the streets; and a woman steering an airplane above the revolutionarycity of the future. The 1908 revolution will never look quite the same to readers familiar with the (still scant) treatmentof the subjectin the English language. PalmiraBrummettaddressesher innovative study not only to revisionist historians of the late Ottoman period, but also to a wider community of scholars interested in the history of publishing and the constructionof identity in the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere. The importanceof the satiricalgazettes (mizahmecmualari) is suggested first by their apparent popularity.While just 103 Turkish-languagegazettes were published between 1879 and 1907, years of palace censorship, 240 new gazettes were published in 1908-09, when press laws were relaxed in the revolution's first year. Brummett focuses on sixty-eight Turkishlanguage gazettes, all published in Istanbulbetween 1908 and 1911, that she terms "satirical." Satire, which had a long history before the revolution, clearly appealed to people inspiredbut also bewildered by revolutionarychange: "[t]he Ottoman press.. . had a field day after the revolution, and nowhere were the critiques of revolution, of imperialism,and of culture more pointed than in the satiricalgazettes" (p. 3). While the satiricalgazettes were only one facet of the revolutionarypress explosion, Brummettargues that they representa distinct and heretofore unstudiedvoice, "ajaundiced eye, which saw in revolution not solely the ideal-inducedeuphoria of freedom but the reality-inducedskepticism of imperialist innovation and bureaucratic paralysis"(p. 18). Moreover, they created, among their mainly male, elite readers,a "public" and a voice for that public (Chapters3 and 4). In addition, Brummettargues, the cartoons in the gazettes probably reached audiences far beyond the literate elite, and so reflect broader popular sentiment. For these reasons, Brummetteschews a focus on the top newspapersof the period in favor of a focus on the seemingly marginal-but popular and populist-satirical gazette.

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In additionto their marketimportance,the gazettes present a significant window on revolutionarythought and process, Brummettargues. Their cartoons became an arena in which Ottoman identity and sovereignty were constructedthroughthe creationof, and competition among, revolutionarysymbols (pp. 14, 317). Nuances of meaning that made contemporarieschuckle, however, are often lost over time. Brummettthereforecautions that hers must necessarily be a preliminary"archeological"study. In a series of chaptersdevoted to cartoon themes of sovereignty, Europeanpolitical and cultural influence, disease, fashion, street life, and technology, she sifts through layers of meaning that have faded over decades of cultural and political change. Each chapter seeks to retrieve the cartoons' original meanings by reconstitutingtheir textual and historical contexts. Brummett'sforay into pictorial archeology yields some surprising finds. Expecting to find the secular-religious ideological cleavage that characterizedthe French revolutionarypress (and that has dominated historians' interpretationof the Young Turk revolution), Brummett finds none. Instead, Brummett discovers the dominant theme to be anxiety about European influence and invasion. This mind-set is comprehensible,Brummettargues, only if we understand the OttomanEmpire in a colonial context: "althoughthe Ottoman state was not directly conqueredand 'colonized' in the sense that India was colonized, its systems (education, communication, transport),economy, and culture had been colonized as surely as had those of India"(p. 13). Fear of Europeandesigns on the realm preservedIslam as a social cement, she argues,and divertedmany satiristsfrom engaging in internaldisputesthat might have weakened defenses. This was no reactionaryIslam, however. Brummettchallenges prevailing views that the 1908 revolution essentially polarized Islam against the West, or religion against progress. Satirists and their readers, she argues, occupied and preferreda middle ground, where Islam was seen not as a reactionaryforce but as a unifying force in a society under tremendous pressure from external invasion. Indeed, in their view Islam was not antitheticalto modernity and technology; rather,it was essential to their future progress as a sovereign society. Satirical gazettes, she concludes, reflected a complex modernityand a prevailing sentiment of Ottoman solidarity against a common foreign threat (pp. 314-25). The colonial premise informs Brummett's thematic analysis of the cartoons in the book's main chapters. On comic images of sovereignty, for example, Brummett argues that colonial anxiety profoundly altered perceived goals of the revolution. The threat of invasion "made many writers skeptical that a parliamentcould effectively replace the authorityof the sultan" (p. 13). They thus defied a strict dichotomy between constitutionalismand sultanism. Some satirists portrayed monarchy as obsolete, as in a cartoon placing Sultan Abdulhamid in an "Outcasts' Club," bowling like a retiree with the Shah of Iran and the Moroccan king (pp. 118-19). Others portrayedthe sultan as a collaboratorwith foreign imperialists or as bloody tyrant, his throne surroundedby the skulls of innocent citizens (p. 125). The parliamentary regime was hardly portrayedas a positive antidote, however, as images emphasized the ignorance, corruption,and greed of ministers and deputies (pp. 132-47). Underlying the disdain for unresponsive government was the fear that its weakness would let the European wolf in the door. Another salient theme was the critique of Europeaninfluences on popular culture, fashion, and urbanpublic space (Chapters7-10). Throughtheir critique, Brummettfound, the cartoons forged a popular notion of Ottoman identity that was quite distinct from the narrow Turkish nationalism that many scholars today say characterizedthe period. Satirists did not necessarily choose the old over the new but sought an Ottomanmodernitybased in some kind of continuity with the past that was independent of Europe. Patriotic women in practical, national dress (and not veiled) were offered as positive symbols of the nation (p. 243), whereas fads imported from Europe, such as spiritualism and ice-skating, were portrayed as ridiculous

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pastimes of the rich (pp. 213-20). Women dressed in Parisian fashions became the most common symbol of the subversion of Ottoman culture. Several cartoons used such women to portray the invasion of deadly cholera into Istanbul's streets (pp. 273-87). Most of all, the cartoons simply marveled at the changes in Ottoman society, portraying sheer wonder at the simultaneousdanger and promise of tramways, automobiles, and dirigibles. Many carculture run according to "Western" toons, for example, spoofed attempts to make "Oriental" clocks: "[t]herewas clearly ambivalence over whether the Ottomanempire should be run on Europeantime and a Europeancalendarjust because it now had a European-styleconstitution" (p. 313). The emphasis on a common culture and shared difference from Europe, Brummett argues, dominated the cartoons to the near-exclusion of cartoons focused on differences among Ottoman citizens. Brummett found few cartoons concerned with ethnic separatism, the conflict between nationalism and empire, or tensions between nationalism and religion that scholars have supposed to be dominantperspectives of the revolutionaryperiod. Ethnicity, rather,was portrayed in cartoons to dramatize rural culture-the Anatolian peasant or Albanian villager-as opposed to the cosmopolitanOttomanismof the city. Ethnicity was also reservedfor foreigners:Moroccansand Egyptianswere portrayedas distinctlyArab, while Syrians were not so differentiatedfrom other Ottomans.Brummettsuggests that this attitudemay simply reflect the Ottomanistbias of gazette publishersratherthan general opinion (pp. 321-23). of These findings resonate with some other recent reinterpretations the period, especially Selim Deringil's view of Sultan Abdulhamidas a very modernmonarchin The WellProtected Domains and Hasan Kayali's de-emphasisof Turkishnationalismin his Arabs and YoungTurks. Brummett'sgeneral findings conflict, however, with studies that have focused on women and minorities in the late Ottoman period, groups seen as caught in the ideological vise of tradidichotomies. This is a limitation tional-modern, Islamic-Western,and multicultural-nationalist perhaps inherentin Brummett'sproject to conduct an intensive analysis of a single subgenreof press publications.But while Brummettuses the cartoons to problematizereceived understandings of the Ottomanconsitutional revolution, she does not pretendto offer a global rereading of it. Indeed, she emphasizes that hers is only one of many possible readingsof the revolutionary mood (p. 23). It is left largely to the reader-and to those inspired to conduct further these satiristsand their principallymale, elite audience research-to decide how representative of Istanbulwere of broaderrevolutionarytrends. This would seem to be a narrow goal for such a large book, were it not for Brummett's demonstratedcommitment to unearthing, surveying, and deciphering a hitherto unexploited historical source. Research on the Middle Eastern press is in its infancy, and so the basic exposition of the journals and their contents is justified. Hence, Brummettstays close to her analysis of the cartoons, providingonly enough historicalbackgroundto explain them contextually. In this same spirit, she provides a full inventory of the sixty-eight gazettes examined, a price list, and a map of publishing houses in the appendix. (It would also have been helpful had Brummettprovided citations with the cartoons' captions, ratherthan forcing the readerto search through endnotes.) In its effort to sketch the relationshipbetween the press and the formationof political and culturalidentities,Brummett'sbook joins recent studies such as those by ElizabethFriersonon the late Ottomanpress, by Beth Baronon the early Egyptianwomen's press, by Rashid Khalidi on early Arab nationalism in Syrian and Palestinian newspapers,by Walter Armbrustand Ami Ayalon generally on Arab journalism, and by various scholars of small media in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. With its foregroundingof the methodological dilemmas of decipheringimages, the book makes a particularlysignificant contributionto recent studies of Middle Eastern cartoons in volumes published by, among others, Janet Afary on the Iranianconstitutionalrevolution, Fatma Mtige G6oek on political cartoons, and Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas on Arab comic strips.