FROM ANKARA TO WASHINGTON: SUBALTERN GEOPOLITICS OF CINEMA IN THE WAR ON TERROR

Abstract

The 9/11 attacks saw the global geopolitical map drawn into new geographical specifications consisting of the U.S. and its allies against the ‘terrorists’. Currently, hegemonic geopolitical imaginations and approaches to global security are dominated by the dichotomous logic of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which valorizes Washington as its geopolitical center. While critical approaches to geopolitics have been attentive to the Western-centrism of this imaginary, studies of non-Western perceptions of security in the GWOT are still largely absent. Turkey, for instance, was often captured in Western geopolitics (i.e. as a member of NATO, an ally of the U.S. in the Cold War, and later as an opposition to the Iraq War) but rarely made an impact in critical geopolitics. This research hopes to add to the scarce literature of critical subaltern geopolitics regarding the GWOT and security by investigating popular geopolitical imaginations from the hegemon and the margins. This would be done through compositional and semiotic analyses, as well as audience studies on two Hollywood and Turkish (post- Yesilçam) films. Through the dual-framework of anti-geopolitics and subaltern geopolitics, I hope to achieve the following two objectives. First, I intend to address how films can be used as anti-geopolitical tools – by filmmakers or the audience – to challenge hegemonic post-9/11 geopolitics. Second, I aim to show that representations must be further understood through subaltern geopolitics, to discern how and why the GWOT is represented as such by the subaltern in relation to the hegemon. Only in acknowledging the complexities of the subaltern, whose security is linked to the hegemon, we can then reconceptualize security more effectively from the margins. Ultimately, I hope to add a postcolonial sensibility to critical geopolitics by including ‘other voices’, perspectives from the margins of hegemonic geopolitical imagination.