This article focuses on the local humor employed in the Gezi Park Protests, one of the most widespread protests in the history of modern Turkey. By analyzing examples of widely circulated graffiti in the social media during and after the Gezi Park protests, I explore the role of socio-cultural and political humor in the protests as a form of resistance, which is intertwined in many ways with local popular culture, as well as global cultural forms of resistance used in anti-capitalist movements such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and public protests in Greece, Egypt, Algeria, and Spain. The humor and laughter in political processes manifests relation to traditional Turkish cultural forms. However, context-bounded humor originating from local meanings and traditional folk stories in the humorous graffiti of the Gezi Protests is considered not only an artistic and creative form of opposition to the conservative-religiousakpgovernment, but also a local response to global capitalism.
This article analyses two related phenomena, the transformation of Turkish nationalism and the articulation of a modern Turkish national identity through global processes. To understand these, the paper critically examines the cultural politics of an advertising campaign for Benetton Condoms that came out in 2000. Relying on interviews conducted with the employees of an advertising agency and basing my conclusion on a textual analysis of the outcomes of this campaign, it is argued that during this critical period of Turkey’s rapid expansion to become a player in the global marketplace, such a campaign articulated global consumerism and Turkish nationalism. The result was the construction of a new Turkish identity; “global Turkishness”. In the cultural imagination of advertisers, concepts such as race, sexuality and disease become constituent elements of this global national identity. These concepts also articulate a popular consumerist Turkishness through the Benetton advertising campaign.
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