A SINGLE GRAIN OF INDIGO: A READING ON MONGOLS AND TURKS IN THE U.S. LOCAL PRESS (1850-1923)

Abstract

In the 19th century, when belief in racial discrimination and superiority could find a response at social and even moral levels, claims about humanity as a biological species turned into a number of pseudoscientific assumptions. This inevitably constituted a legitimate ground for Orientalist stereotypes such as barbarism, despotism, ignorance, fanaticism and backwardness directed towards Eastern societies. Orientalism, which has been a baseline for the pride and superiority discourse inherent to the Western society since the second half of 18th century has been a method for their struggle to examine, learn and reign the East and the Easterners through a number of biased theories and practices which are considered as facts without any doubt. It is possible to approach the American society as a large-scale and heterogeneous sample that represents the West in the analysis of race-based reductionist discourse, which is steered to Eastern civilizations and endeavored to gain legitimacy through Orientalism.
 
 This study aims to reveal the locally-penetrated reflections of a number of racist stereotypes claiming to be scientific and which take their place in the American press since the second half of 19th century in regards to Turkish and Mongolian identities that are frequently positioned opposite to Western societies in the context of being an ‘other’. These two ethnical groups which embrace historically archaic bonds in between has been demonstrated in the local American press as unique sometimes, and neighboring at times; but at the same time, as the carriers of a low-profile culture that can easily be differentiated from Western civilization at every attempt due to its racial specifications.
 
 The image of Central Asia and its peoples in the American local press throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was represented by travel notes, columns, political news, short stories, and funnies. These texts and illustrations, which are mostly of pseudoscientific concerns, were sometimes published simultaneously in different states with a number of old articles and columns were reprinted in accordance with the conjuncture of the day. Among these, there are texts that tried to establish kinship ties between Germans and Mongols based on so-called scientific data obtained from skull measurements during the Great War, thus accusing Germans of being aggressive by nature. The anti-German propaganda that took place in the American local press also reveals that the word Mongolian turned into one of the main reference points of the racist paradigm during this period. Indeed, terms such as Mongol, Mongolian, and Mongoloid have expanded in meaning to characterize all peoples classified as yellow race by Westerners such as the Chinese and Japanese.
 
 The image of Turks in the American local press offers a common area that can be analyzed in the same context. The texts in question reveal the mentality in which the racist belief that constitutes the basis for hate speech is preserved, but a much harsher and uncompromising style is adopted. This can be explained by the fact that, while the American local press spread orientalist content during the 19th century, and at the same time hosted the anti-Turkish campaigns of the Armenian diaspora throughout the country.