The Roma Image in the Mainstream Turkish Audiovisual Media: Sixty Years of Stereotyping

Abstract

This article seeks to address one of the most problematic lacunae in Turkey's political and academic landscape by examining the mediated images of the Roma people in Turkey. This long-neglected sub-cultural group in the Turkish context is mostly regarded as the “others” of society, who cannot speak for themselves. Their public imagination is, therefore, based heavily on narratives that are exclusively produced by non-Roma people. In order to reveal the historical construction of the popular Roma image in Turkey, we cover audiovisual material from the 1960s onward. Through a descriptive-interpretive analysis, we seek to explore how cultural and artistic narratives have contributed to and/or mirrored, and thus reproduced, the prevailing knowledge and imagination about the Roma people in Turkish society. © 2019 Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.