Abstract
This project examines the ways Arab intellectuals and visual artists in the 1930s and 1940s used graphic media to confront the ascendant racial ideologies of Nazism and Fascism, paying close attention to how cartoons, comic strips, and illustrated commentary circulated in newspapers and radio magazines such as al-Mustamiʿ al-ʿArabī. The period generated intense debate about the future of Palestine, especially between 1929 and 1938, yet Arab writers and intellectuals in cities like Tetouan, Cairo, Paris, Berlin, Baghdad, London, Beirut, Algiers, Fez, and Constantine simultaneously produced sharp critiques of European doctrines of racial hierarchy, often treating fascist claims to civilization as “brittle constructions” that collapsed under scrutiny. Their visual work translated and rendered complex racial theories intelligible to broad urban publics, drawing on caricature, inversion, and narrative humor to expose the violence embedded in Aryanist thought and to highlight its consequences for colonized populations across North Africa and the Middle East; these techniques created a visual pedagogy that invited readers to understand fascist modernity as both alluring and profoundly destructive. The study situates these illustrated materials within the wider communicative landscape of the time, which included radio broadcasting, street-corner periodical culture, and emerging forms of anti-colonial critique, since these contexts shaped how audiences encountered and interpreted satirical depictions of Hitlerism, Fascism, and racial science. Attention to this media ecology clarifies how popular satire offered early frameworks through which Arab readers could grasp the links between European antisemitism, racism, and the racial governance practiced in their own colonial environments. By assembling the first integrated analysis of this dispersed visual archive, the project shows how comics and satirical imagery functioned as forms of political instruction that helped articulate Arab understandings of race, empire, and authoritarian ambition, and how these materials contributed to a longer regional tradition of challenging hate through what I call graphic satire.
