Roads "drawn" to modernity: religion and secularism in contemporary Turkey

Abstract

Editorial cartoons do not just mirror politics, but are also themselves a part of politics. They are more than single-panel graphical commentaries on daily policies, for they construct their own claims on truth. The cartoonist can use the polysemic nature of visual signs and present a distinct framing perspective. Editorial cartoonists with certain ideological stances can become an actor in "the struggle for cultural supremacy," in Tarrow's (1998) term. This struggle refers to efforts by the state, media, and social movements to influence the interpretative processes by which individuals negotiate the meaning of events. This paper analyzes the editorial cartoons in Turkish daily newspapers in terms of their competing framings of contemporary Turkey's secularist-Islamist division. Secularism and Islamism refer here to political projects that seek to transform and reinstitute a sociopolitical order on the basis of some constitutive norms (Çinar 2005, 8-9).