Cinema Capitalism and the Turkish Imagination: Mickey Mouse, Global US Icons, Karagöz, and Cultural Conflict in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract This article examines the circulation, adaptation, and contestation of US mass culture in early republican Turkey through encounters between Mickey Mouse, Hollywood cinema, and the Ottoman shadow play Karagöz. Although Mickey was the first global icon to enter Turkish children’s media in the 1930s, he was soon followed by figures such as Tarzan, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and King Kong. Their rapid diffusion coincided with Turkey’s own processes of modernization, urbanization, and emerging capitalist cultural markets. Drawing on children’s magazines, theatrical adaptations, and contemporary intellectual critiques, the study analyzes how these imported icons were vernacularized, moralized, or resisted within national pedagogical frameworks. It juxtaposes the nationalist and moralist reactions of figures like İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, Haşim Nahit, and Enver Naci with Nâzım Hikmet’s socialist anti-imperialist perspective. Ultimately, the article argues that these visual encounters reveal a contested field in which Turkish modernity was actively negotiated rather than passively imported.