In his seminal essay, “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), Roland Barthes establishes the core concepts and steps of semiotic approach towards the study of image. He defines three semiotic codes in the pictorial text (the linguistic, the coded iconic, and the non-coded iconic) and analyzes the functions of the linguistic message through the discussion of “anchorage” and “relay.” Drawing on the rich intertextuality between word and image, this paper discusses the significant role of visual culture in the works produced during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Rather than an exclusive approach to examine verbal documents from the period, this presentation favors a combined semiotic, discursive, and aesthetic approach to study the political graphics against a background of changes in the national and transnational political realities. Aside from the discourse of various ideological messages, this project also focuses on how the political visual art was utilized by various artists to persuade and mobilize the population to support the revolution; an effective modality that both influenced and reflected the sociopolitical climate of the period. Incorporating elements of native culture and religion, revolutionary posters are great sights of collective memory and close reading of them provides a particular kind of lens through which one can reconstruct the factuality of historical events and analyze the utilization of public spaces for the purpose of political changes. Although a written history of the revolution is a great data for the interests of critical analysis, yet, these invaluable visual archives are also a vivid addition to the existing literature of the historiography on the Iranian Revolution.

Recognizing the creative political communication strategies initiated by the Iranian Green Movement in June 2009 following disputed Presidential election results is imperative in broadening current narrow conceptualizations of “Arab spring” protests. We explore how the Green Movement articulated alternative discursive strategies in their resistance to perceived voter fraud. In response to popular protests, the Iranian government sent the military and police force to control these crowds, sadly causing many deaths and numerous arrests. The Green Movement emerged with an imaginative civil disobedience campaign, worth exploring in terms of its political discourse. Our analyses map the character of this discourse as creative, in its strategies, and as transnational, in terms of language, distribution, and gendered expectations. Despite emphases in western media on the prominence of digital media in mobilizing activism, the Green Movement worked with a variety of communications approaches, as versatile as traditional sweet dishes concocted in commemoration of the Tragedy of Karbala inscribed with political statements in cinnamon powder, to graffitti on busses, street curbs and walls posting marg bar khamnei (death to Khamnei), and resistance slogans written on money. With this latter illustration of national currency stamped with anti-regime messages such as green victory signs, we consider how the material bill serves as a site for resistance against state-controlled artefacts, reappropriated as symbolic currency in political protests. We consider the transnational character of this national movement, through the mobilization of artists and movements outside of the country. Not only did Neda’s death become reconfigured as iconic in virtual global space, but even more compelling are the stamps and posters, in English, composed in green, distributed through postal and digital channels. It is worth noting the gendered differences in transnational appropriation of Neda’s image and narrative rather than those of many other victims.

As Hakan Yavuz has discussed, a new Islamic bourgeoisie holds political capital in contemporary Turkey. My presentation analyzes the architectural voice of said Islamic bourgeoisie by evaluating contemporary government funded urban renewal projects in Turkey. This topic also discusses the counter voices’ response to the urban renewal programs which sparked the Gezi Park protests of summer 2013. My overall argument in the paper focuses on the spatial politics of the AKP and the countervoices of the Gezi Park protesters. My presentation will outline the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey and the visual rhetoric and satire (such as the now-famous image of the penguin) which constituted a reaction to the policies of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – AKP). My research analyzes the spatial politics of the AKP and how they have formed an architectural public sphere which has been criticized by a protest public sphere formulated by the protestors at Gezi Park. I will explore a theoretical concept of Erdoğanian Neo-Ottomanism in regards to the way in which the AKP has redefined urban Turkey. In particular I will analyze the media’s reaction to the protests and the visual rhetoric employed by the protesters to oppose the AKP’s spatial politics. I will also describe ethnographic research that I conducted in Istanbul during Gezi Park and share some of the reactions of my respondents. I will conclude by briefly tying this subject to the recent media coverage of AKP corruption probes in Turkey.

Gezi Park protests, which started as a small environmentalist objection to the uprooting of trees in a park in the heart of Istanbul, evolved to a widespread people’s uprising all around Turkey after disproportionate use of police force against the protesters. To challenge an increasingly authoritarian government, the protesters used novel repertoires of contention, particularly political graffiti. Graffiti, as a form of pictorial and written text, include a multitude of linguistic and artistic features that move beyond a simple mode of expression. As an important form of linguistic communication in the public space, graffiti is used to explicitly or implicitly support, refute, resist various political ideologies of the current time. According to Hanauer (2004) graffiti allows the entry within public discourse of messages regarded as marginal by other media, and provides the actors with the opportunity to express controversial contents publicly. With this in mind, languages we see in these public texts are usually hybridized and emergent. In the context of translingual flows, the creators of graffiti usually refer to multilingual resources such as the use of hybrid modes of languages. In such cases, we often see an emergence of code-meshing where English, as a global language, is mixed with the local language usually in order to get the attention of the international media and to access to a transnational public space. In this paper, we discuss how the texts and contexts that are embedded in the language used in graffiti during Gezi Park protests of 2013 drew the political landscape of Turkey and represented various socio-political grievances. Building on the theories of translingualism, discourse analysis and social movement, this paper discusses the production, distribution and consumption of graffiti that emerged in Istanbul as a result of street protests. In our analysis we aim to address three questions: 1) What counter-narratives are created in the linguistic landscape of Istanbul in the wake of Gezi events? 2) How does the use of graffiti help us to reconceptualize forms of collective action and formation of new alliances in contemporary Turkey? 3) What indexical properties are seen in the languages used in graffiti, and what do they mean for understanding the boundaries between the local and the global?