Session Abstract

Building on Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, this panel seeks to address the multiple roles that trans-regional media networks (particularly newspapers and journals) have played in shaping public opinions and political views in the Middle East during the twentieth century.  Many constituent elements of the public spheres found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English, French and German bourgeoisies, such the expansion of printing, the growth of newspapers, and the establishment of literary salons, coffee houses and political associations, can be found in the Middle East beginning in the early twentieth century.  Thus, this panel seeks to explore the cooperative and competitive interactions between and among various media outlets, as well as examine how press outlets across national or regional divides contributed to the development of public spheres in Middle Eastern societies.

Moving chronologically, the first paper considers how local economic, geographical and socio-religious conditions, such as the intensity of commercial activities, the proximity to borderlands, and the density of educational networks simultaneously enables and limits the emergence of provincial public spheres in early twentieth-century Iran.  The second paper shows how the antifascist stance found in the publications of the Iraq Communist Party shaped Iraq’s culture in the decades following 1941 and advanced the activities of various organizations in the public sphere, even under British supervision. The third paper argues that the rapid growth of religious print media in Turkey following the introduction of democratic politics in 1945 provided Turks with the new opportunity to identify their nation as part of the Muslim world, despite the government’s overall secular orientation. The last paper examines how Palestinian activists in the Israeli Communist Party utilized expressions of solidarity with anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa during the 1960s to challenge state policies and assert cultural ties to the Arab world and the global South, helping to further develop the already emerging Palestinian counterpublic in Israel.

By bringing together scholars whose work focuses on Iran, Turkey and the Arab world, this panel seeks to provide a comparative framework through which to investigate the role of media networks in the development and expansion of the public sphere, as well as to provide a forum to push the analytical boundaries of our understanding of these notions.