Perin Gurel

Using official and popular print sources in Persian, Turkish, German, and English, this essay examines how Iran’s last Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi came to represent both positive and negative aspects of Iranian modernization in the 1960s and 1970s. The Empress and Iran were judged through comparative methods according to standards dominated by the United States but contested the world over. American diplomats and CIA researchers based in Iran evinced both fascination and ambivalence with the image of the Empress while prevaricating on its political implications. However, a more robust theory of “soft power” prevailed in mainstream capitalist magazines and dissident texts. While the Empress’s appearance could bolster positive arguments about Iran as a modernization success story, ultimately, politics constituted the lens through which aesthetics was judged and not vice versa. Criticism of Empress Farah and Iranian modernization soon coalesced around the gendered trope of superficial aesthetics, eventually undoing Pahlavi nation-branding.

How did ideas about humor shape US allies’ perceptions of America and Americans during the Cold War? This essay offers a small part of the puzzle by examining a category of unfunny jokes that midcentury Turks came to call “Amerikan.” The structure of these jokes shifted between the late 1940s and 1990s, offering clues as to how disparate cultures can merge and transform across uneven power divides. The label itself and the connection to “unlaughter,” however, also operated as a political index. Turkish opinion leaders and journalists used Amerikan jokes to comment on US actions, including Cold War aid policy and the war in Vietnam, and to code local perceptions of American political leaders, including President Harry Truman, then senator Joseph Biden, and President Ronald Reagan. Using Turkish newspaper archives and Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports, this essay demonstrates how ideas about American national character coded through humor could influence local perceptions at a time when the United States was both seeking to differentiate itself from Europe as a “benevolent” world power and driving economic and cultural change in newly independent nations.

Focusing on images disseminated by the mainstream laicist press in the 1990s, this essay examines how Turkey’s headscarf bans were bolstered not just by negative images of veiling and positive images of unveiling, but also by images of women wearing what was deemed a good or acceptable type of headscarf or wear- ing the headscarf in contexts that were deemed appropriate. In other words, counter to prevailing opinion, Turkey’s “secularist” opinion leaders did not simply ban the headscarf, but also praised and promoted it, or at least versions of it and times and places for it, in the late twentieth century. These images of the “good” headscarf worn by the “good” female citizen were intimately connected to dominant constructions of Turkishness and related to gendered ideas about the citizen’s willing submission to the state. Studying the images and texts generated by mainstream laicist newspapers in support of the ban and revisiting the fractals of difference established around practices of head covering at this time helps highlight the ambiguities of Turkish laicism and the post-coup Turkish-Islamic synthesis.

This essay review examines the varied ways contemporary Americanists have studied US-Middle East encounters. It features reviews of books by Alex Lubin and Marwan Kraidy, eds., Brian T. Edwards, Keith Feldman, and Chad Parker. The following link should take you to the full essay (open access): https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/doi/10.1093/alh/ajx014/4037326/Contested-Encounters-Boundaries-of-American?guestAccessKey=7ad16698-3966-414f-a306-f5b13a5b669b

Using a transnational and comparative cultural studies approach,
this essay investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and
foreign food in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States, became
localized through intersectional processes of feminization and
de-exoticization. In the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, the
dairy industry adopted a postfeminist ethos, which co-opted the hippie
and feminist self-care movements that had made yogurt a staple
health food outside the purview of the medical-industrial complex
and on the margins of the market economy. Increasingly, yogurt was
marketed to the prototypical (white middle class) dieting female,
expected to discipline her body by consuming pre-proportioned approximations of dessert. The rising popularity of “Greek yogurt” in
the early twenty-first century has modified this cultural neutralization
by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity—while
furthering the feminization of yogurt consumption and obscuring
connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.

This essay focuses on the tumultuous period between 1918 and 1923, from the end of World War I to the declaration of the Turkish republic, when the United States became seriously engaged with the fate of the Near East because of calls for a US mandate over Ottoman Turkey. At its center is the history and historiography of a short-lived Turkish Wilsonian Principles League (WPL), founded by the feminist intellectual Halide Edib, which called for the United States to assume a mandate over Turkey. The way that the WPL is overremembered in modern Turkey and forgotten in the United States shows how ideas about gender and sexuality continue to infuse national memory in both countries. Examining Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to think of Turks as wards and the vilification of Edib by the first Turkish republican regime, the essay complicates the causal links we might be tempted to draw between racism and empire and asks us to consider the complex role that the local deployments of westernization play in the absence of actual US intervention.

Mass-mediated American culture and the English language became raw materials for vernacular protest humor alongside images of headscarf-wearing middle-aged “aunties” during antigovernment protests in Turkey in the summer of 2013. Focusing on posts shared on Facebook and Twitter by Turkish protestors and their supporters in the first two months of the protests, this article studies the complex linguistic and visual humor that developed around Gezi Park and relates it to the identity politics mobilized during the resistance. Exploring how the protestors projected themselves as both cosmopolitan (through the use of American mass culture and the English language) and locally rooted (through the use of auntie humor), the essay delineates how “America” can function in local Middle Eastern politics even in the absence of actual US intervention on the ground. Humor at Gezi demonstrates how closely analyzing transculturated vernacular communication can help us modify Western-derived academic theories about culture and power, making the case for incorporating the study of folklore into transnational American Studies.

In April 1954, William March's The Bad Seed, a novel about a dysgenic child murderer named Rhoda, was published and became an instant bestseller. The same year, Maxwell Anderson's play version hit Broadway to high acclaim, and, in 1956, Warner Brothers released a popular film adaptation. This article studies the text and reception of The Bad Seed as it is transferred and transformed through these media (that of the naturalist novel, Broadway play, and controversial Hollywood movie) with a critical focus on stylistic naturalism, sex, and reproduction. It contrasts March's insistence on realism and naturalism, exemplified by his incorporation of real-life stories within the fictional work, with Anderson's and Warner Brothers’ de-naturalizing alterations. Through textual and historical analysis, with special focus on the public discussions generated by the texts, this article serves as a case study of multiple adaptations and how they were influenced by underlying anxieties about pronatalism and heredity in early postwar culture.

In December 1918 Turkish feminist author Halide Edib co-founded the Turkish Wilsonian Principles League with other prominent intellectuals. The members immediately sent a letter to President Woodrow Wilson asking him to accept a mandate over the remainders of the Ottoman ...