MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the first half of the 20th century the U.S. was leading the domestic appliance market with popular brands like General Electric, Frigidaire and Hoover. These brands also dominated the Turkish market during the same period in the lack of a domestic producer. Design and marketing of their electric household appliances offered novel ways to propagate new lifestyles in both sides of the globe. While in the U.S. appliances were marketed as inseparable parts of an American way of life, they were introduced in Turkey as the basic components of a modern life. Yet, various articles, images and advertisements which promoted electric appliances in the popular women’s and decoration magazines like Yedigün or Ev-İş were largely borrowed and translated from the U.S. analogues like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. Thus the introduction of electric appliances in Turkey was a process of translation which both refers to the rendering of texts from English to Turkish and the process of appropriation and negotiation of the ideals and values suggested by the texts and images in question. This paper focuses on the conditions of borrowing in order to figure out how American way of living was negotiated in Turkey throughout the 1930s and 1940s. By a comparison of the ads and promotional texts published in the U.S. and Turkey I intend to clarify how American way of living was incorporated into the republican ideal of modernity. The comparison will dwell mainly on a critical visual analysis of the advertising images as well as the critical reading of the copies and other textual material.