Through researching the declassified paper-trail USIA collection available at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, MD, this presentation tells the story of the arrival of the first television station to Iraq during the mid-1950s through the sponsorship of the United States Operation Mission (USOM) and the United States Information Service (USIS) in the country as a case of binational bureaucratic television diplomacy. The presentation builds upon a group of memos that A. Vance Hallack, the American television advisor serving the government of Iraq, wrote for his American supervisors between the September of 1956 to 1957. These documents provide a detailed account of establishing the first television station with both entertaining and educational content in an Arab country in the Middle East. The idea of exporting television technology to Iraq came as a result of an inquiry by Ford Foundation for establishing a regional audio-visual center in the Middle East. Initially, the United States government sent the Syracuse documentary crew to Iran in 1950 for an exploratory mission of making educational films among Iranian villagers while using them as documentary participants. Not only Iran but also the entire Middle East was weaponized during this era as means of containing strategy against Soviet expansion. This presentation addresses key players responsible for establishing the television station in Iraq as well as the process of making available the American and locally produced content for Iraqi audiences.

Over the past decades, geographers utilized critical theory to reposition geopolitical scholarship beyond the power politics of states, leaders, and those experts who sought to advise them. Much of today’s geopolitical research, therefore, instead interrogates the powerful, their discursive tactics, and their texts. Amid this shift, identifying and examining alternative sources and their geopolitical narratives—from mass or popular culture to graffiti and indigenous voices—has also become a vital concern. This paper draws on this emerging tradition to engage with a ubiquitous, highly political, but often disregarded cultural product in Turkish studies; the comic book. In doing so, this research begins this line of inquiry into Turkish popular culture and its geopolitical significance by focusing on one of the most common tropes of Turkish political scholarship; nationalism. This point of entry also aligns conveniently with recent scholarship on comic books from the United States and the question of nationalism protagonists. While the “nationalist superhero” of American comics of the mid-twentieth century commanded a privileged place, it was nonetheless a distinct niche in the country’s much larger catalog of comic publications and was highly subject to current events. In contrast, the Turkish equivalent occupied a dominant place in terms of the overall number of works produced and read, and its settings ranged broadly from past-to-present and throughout the wider regions of the Middle East and Eurasia. As such, the Turkish—and oftentimes Turkic—superhero appeared as a nationalist archetype that was depicted both in a primordial (e.g., Eurasian folkloric) manner and as an officer or agent of the modern republic. Focused on this mainstay Turkey’s Cold War era—the nationalist superhero, this paper draws on examples from several of the foremost publications that emerged during these years, adding to the field of popular geopolitics while contributing uniquely to broader scholarly on traditions concerned with Turkish national identity and ideology.

With the triumph of Soviet expansion after the Russian Revolution, many opposition Turkic political activists recognized that domestic avenues for change within Russia had become exhausted. Resigned to defeat, they became dispersed over a wide geography in exile. While much has been written on Turkic émigré networks in Europe, less attention has been granted to corresponding networks in the east. Communities of Turkic peoples sprang up in Japan, while other communities entrenched themselves within the Turkic populations of China. They assumed that China’s proximity to Central Asia would provide them with a springboard to continue to resist Soviet expansion. However, facing communist revolution for a second time, many émigré activists were drawn into domestic Chinese politics. They embedded themselves in the cause of Chiang Kai-shek; eventually finding themselves in exile for a second time in Taiwan. With the advent of the Cold War, Turkic émigrés in Asia sought to carve out space in the emerging international discourse as the west strove to broaden the global front against communism. Conversely, while previously unheeded by successive Turkish governments, émigré Turkic communities suddenly became relevant in Turkey for the purposes of domestic discourse and as an instrument of foreign policy in the broader Cold War context. This paper looks at the transnational Turkic émigré networks in Asia in the context of the Cold War, with a focus on how previously marginal political movements gained international recognition in changing political circumstances. Anti-communist émigré networks were given impetus due to the establishment of new fora in which they could advocate for their cause. This paper also looks at how this unfolding situation was perceived in Turkey, which served as a central node in the Asian Turkic émigré networks.

The assassination attempt on the prominent journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman by an eighteen-year-old nationalist, Huseyin Uzmez, in 1952, signified an important change in nationalist conservatism during the multi-party years. During the Second World War, a group of Turkish nationalists diverged themselves from the ruling Kemalist regime by developing a sharp opposition to communism based on ethnic Turkish identity from the mid-1940s onward. With the beginning of multi-party years, Turkish nationalist conservatism transitioned by synthesizing Islamist and nationalist ideologies. The assassination attempt of Yalman showed that not only left-wing intellectuals but also liberals also could be the target of Islamist nationalist ideology. This presentation aims to discuss how nationalism transitioned during the multi-party years and what characteristics made Yalman a target of this Islamic nationalist ideology. This presentation will also attempt to evaluate how the people involved in the assassination attempt narrated this incident and how the personal correspondences between Yalman and Uzmez challenge this narration.