Review 3880179

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Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911 by Palmira BrummettReview by: Elizabeth ThompsonInternational Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 2002), pp. 146-148Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3880179 .

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146 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 34 (2002)of the largerZionist labor movement as a nationalist-colonial-cum-socialistnterprise,and howit defineditself (often througha good deal of cognitive dissonance)through ts imaginationandrepresentationsof Arab workers. At the same time, Bernstein'sfocus on the more exclusionistresults in the labor marketreveals how that ambivalencewas resolved on the ground.With detailed tables and charts compiled througharchival sources and discussions of Arabas well as Jewish industries n Haifa, Bernsteinhas done a great service for scholarsworkingon the inter-wareconomy of Palestine. Arab workers "did not want to construct boundaries"(p. 207), she explains. The problemwas that such boundarieswere in the vested interest of theJewish workers-or, at least, their leadersin the organizedZionist labor movement.Indeed,asshe arguesin her conclusion-rightly, I would say-fifty-odd years after the establishmentofIsraelas a Jewish state,the legacy of theMandatoryperiodmust be considered n any pathologyof why joint action and solidaritybetween the two communities remains illusive.

PALMIRARUMMETT,mage and Imperialism n the OttomanRevolutionaryPress, 1908-1911(Albany:StateUniversityof New YorkPress, 2000). Pp. 489. $86.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.REVIEWEDYELIZABETHHOMPSON, Departmentof History, University of Virginia, Char-lottesvilleThe readerplunges into the whirlwind of revolution in this study of the satiricalpress thatcirculatedafter the Young Turks reinstated he Ottoman constitutionin 1908. The brave newworld depicted in the more than one hundredcartoons reprinted n this work is headed inunknown and often paradoxicaldirections:we see starvingpeasantsconfrontfur-coatedrevolu-tionaries;dragon-headeddespots leading Lady Libertyby the arm;cadaverouscholera victimspatrolling the streets;and a woman steering an airplane above the revolutionarycity of thefuture. The 1908 revolutionwill never look quite the same to readers familiarwith the (stillscant)treatmentof the subject n the Englishlanguage.PalmiraBrummettaddressesherinnova-tive study not only to revisionist historians of the late Ottomanperiod, but also to a widercommunityof scholars interestedin the history of publishingand the constructionof identityin the Middle East, Europe,and elsewhere.The importanceof the satiricalgazettes (mizahmecmualari)is suggestedfirstby theirappar-ent popularity.While just 103 Turkish-languagegazettes were published between 1879 and1907, years of palace censorship, 240 new gazettes were published in 1908-09, when presslaws were relaxed in the revolution's first year. Brummett focuses on sixty-eight Turkish-language gazettes, all publishedin Istanbulbetween 1908 and 1911, that she terms "satirical."Satire,which had a long historybefore the revolution,clearly appealedto people inspiredbutalso bewildered by revolutionarychange: "[t]he Ottomanpress.. . had a field day after therevolution,and nowhere were the critiquesof revolution,of imperialism,and of culturemorepointedthanin the satiricalgazettes" (p. 3). While the satiricalgazettes were only one facet ofthe revolutionarypress explosion, Brummettarguesthatthey representa distinct andheretoforeunstudiedvoice, "ajaundicedeye, which saw in revolution not solely the ideal-inducedeupho-ria of freedom but the reality-induced skepticism of imperialistinnovation and bureaucraticparalysis"(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 inthe gazettes probablyreached audiences far beyond the literateelite, and so reflect broaderpopularsentiment.For these reasons, Brummetteschews a focus on the top newspapersof theperiod in favor of a focus on the seemingly marginal-but popular and populist-satiricalgazette.

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Reviews 147In addition to theirmarket mportance,the gazettes presenta significantwindow on revolu-tionarythoughtandprocess, Brummettargues.Their cartoons became an arena in which Otto-manidentityand sovereigntywere constructed hrough he creationof, andcompetition among,

revolutionarysymbols (pp. 14, 317). Nuances of meaning that made contemporarieschuckle,however, are often lost over time. Brummett hereforecautions that hers must necessarilybe apreliminary"archeological" tudy.In a series of chaptersdevoted to cartoon themes of sover-eignty, Europeanpolitical and culturalinfluence, disease, fashion, street life, and technology,she sifts through layers of meaning that have faded over decades of cultural and politicalchange. Each chapterseeks to retrieve the cartoons' originalmeanings by reconstituting heirtextual and historical contexts.Brummett'sforay into pictorial archeology yields some surprisingfinds. Expecting to findthe secular-religious ideological cleavage that characterized he French revolutionary press(and that has dominated historians' interpretationof the Young Turk revolution), Brummettfinds none. Instead, Brummett discovers the dominant theme to be anxiety about Europeaninfluence and invasion. This mind-set is comprehensible,Brummettargues, only if we under-stand the OttomanEmpirein a colonial context: "although he Ottomanstate was not directlyconqueredand 'colonized' in the sense that India was colonized, its systems (education,com-munication, transport),economy, and culture had been colonized as surely as had those ofIndia"(p. 13). Fear of Europeandesigns on the realmpreservedIslam as a social cement, sheargues,and divertedmanysatirists romengagingin internaldisputesthatmighthave weakeneddefenses. This was no reactionary slam, however. Brummettchallenges prevailingviews thatthe 1908 revolutionessentially polarized Islam against the West, or religion against progress.Satiristsand their readers,she argues, occupied and preferreda middle ground, where Islamwas seen not as a reactionaryforce but as a unifying force in a society under tremendouspressurefrom external invasion. Indeed, in their view Islam was not antitheticalto modernityand technology;rather, t was essential to their futureprogressas a sovereign society. Satiricalgazettes, she concludes, reflected a complex modernityand a prevailingsentimentof Ottomansolidarityagainsta common foreign threat(pp. 314-25).The colonial premise informs Brummett's thematic analysis of the cartoons in the book'smain chapters.On comic images of sovereignty,for example, Brummettargues that colonialanxiety profoundly altered perceived goals of the revolution. The threat of invasion "mademany writers skepticalthat a parliamentcould effectively replace the authorityof the sultan"(p. 13). They thus defied a strict dichotomy between constitutionalismand sultanism. Somesatiristsportrayed monarchyas obsolete, as in a cartoon placing Sultan Abdulhamidin an"Outcasts'Club," bowling like a retiree with the Shah of Iran and the Moroccan king (pp.118-19). Othersportrayedthe sultan as a collaboratorwith foreign imperialistsor as bloodytyrant,his throne surroundedby the skulls of innocent citizens (p. 125). The parliamentaryregime was hardlyportrayedas a positive antidote, however, as images emphasizedthe igno-rance,corruption,andgreedof ministers and deputies(pp. 132-47). Underlyingthe disdainforunresponsivegovernmentwas the fear that its weakness would let the Europeanwolf in thedoor.Another salient theme was the critiqueof European nfluences on popularculture,fashion,and urbanpublic space (Chapters7-10). Throughtheircritique,Brummett ound, the cartoonsforged a popularnotion of Ottomanidentity that was quite distinct from the narrow Turkishnationalism that many scholars today say characterized he period. Satiristsdid not necessar-ily choose the old over the new but sought an Ottomanmodernitybased in some kind of con-tinuity with the past that was independentof Europe. Patriotic women in practical,nationaldress (and not veiled) were offered as positive symbols of the nation (p. 243), whereas fadsimported from Europe, such as spiritualismand ice-skating, were portrayed as ridiculous

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148 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 34 (2002)pastimes of the rich (pp. 213-20). Women dressed in Parisian fashions became the mostcommon symbol of the subversion of Ottoman culture. Several cartoons used such womento portray the invasion of deadly cholera into Istanbul's streets (pp. 273-87). Most of all,the cartoons simply marveled at the changes in Ottomansociety, portraying sheer wonderat the simultaneousdangerand promise of tramways,automobiles,and dirigibles. Many car-toons, for example, spoofed attemptsto make "Oriental" ulture run accordingto "Western"clocks: "[t]herewas clearly ambivalence over whether the Ottomanempire should be run onEuropean ime and a Europeancalendar ust because it now had a European-style onstitution"(p. 313).The emphasis on a common culture and shared differencefrom Europe,Brummettargues,dominatedthe cartoons to the near-exclusion of cartoons focused on differencesamong Otto-man citizens. Brummett found few cartoons concerned with ethnic separatism,the conflictbetween nationalism and empire, or tensions between nationalism and religion that scholarshave supposed to be dominantperspectivesof the revolutionaryperiod. Ethnicity,rather,wasportrayed in cartoons to dramatize rural culture-the Anatolian peasant or Albanian vil-lager-as opposed to the cosmopolitanOttomanismof the city. Ethnicitywas also reservedforforeigners:MoroccansandEgyptianswere portrayedas distinctlyArab,while Syrianswere notso differentiated rom other Ottomans.Brummettsuggests that this attitudemay simply reflectthe Ottomanistbias of gazette publishersrather hangeneral opinion (pp. 321-23).These findings resonate with some other recent reinterpretations f the period, especiallySelim Deringil's view of Sultan Abdulhamidas a very modernmonarch n The WellProtectedDomains and HasanKayali's de-emphasisof Turkishnationalism n his Arabs and YoungTurks.Brummett'sgeneral findings conflict, however, with studies that have focused on women andminorities in the late Ottomanperiod, groups seen as caught in the ideological vise of tradi-tional-modern,Islamic-Western,and multicultural-nationalist ichotomies. This is a limitationperhapsinherent n Brummett'sprojectto conduct an intensiveanalysis of a single subgenreofpress publications.But while Brummettuses the cartoons to problematizereceived understand-ings of the Ottomanconsitutionalrevolution,she does not pretendto offer a global rereadingof it. Indeed,she emphasizesthathers is only one of manypossible readingsof the revolution-ary mood (p. 23). It is left largely to the reader-and to those inspired to conduct furtherresearch-to decide how representativehese satirists and theirprincipallymale, elite audienceof Istanbulwere of broaderrevolutionary rends.This would seem to be a narrow goal for such a large book, were it not for Brummett'sdemonstratedcommitmentto unearthing,surveying, and deciphering a hitherto unexploitedhistorical source. Research on the Middle Eastern press is in its infancy, and so the basicexposition of the journals and their contents is justified. Hence, Brummettstays close to heranalysisof the cartoons,providingonly enough historicalbackground o explainthem contextu-ally. In this same spirit, she provides a full inventoryof the sixty-eight gazettes examined, aprice list, and a map of publishing houses in the appendix.(It would also have been helpfulhad Brummettprovidedcitations with the cartoons' captions,rather han forcing the reader osearch throughendnotes.) In its effort to sketch the relationshipbetween the press and theformationof politicaland cultural dentities,Brummett'sbookjoins recent studies such as thoseby ElizabethFriersonon the late Ottomanpress, by Beth Baron on the early Egyptianwomen'spress, by Rashid Khalidi on early Arab nationalismin Syrianand Palestiniannewspapers,byWalterArmbrustand Ami Ayalon generally on Arabjournalism,and by various scholars ofsmall media in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. With its foregroundingof the methodologicaldilemmas of deciphering mages, the book makes a particularly ignificantcontribution o re-cent studies of Middle Easterncartoons in volumes published by, among others,JanetAfaryon the Iranianconstitutionalrevolution,Fatma Mtige G6oek on political cartoons, and AllenDouglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglason Arab comic strips.