From Moral Panic to Modernity: How Satire Constructs the Ontological Trap of the South Caucasian Subject

Abstract

This article analyzes Armenian and Azerbaijani satirical journals published in Tiflis in the early twentieth century as active instruments of social regulation rather than as reflective cultural texts. Drawing on archival materials, a systematically coded analytical database of Khatabala (1906–1926), and close readings of Molla Nasreddin and Mshak, the study examines how satire shaped subject formation under Russian imperial rule. Using Michel Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, power/knowledge, and biopolitics, combined with Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, the article demonstrates how caricatures and satirical narratives produced regimes of truth concerning gender, religion, violence, and civic responsibility. The findings show that satire functioned as a technology of governance by normalizing certain behaviors, stigmatizing others, and visually encoding moral and political hierarchies. Particular attention is paid to recurring social types, representations of philanthropy and poverty, epidemic imagery, and the regulation of family and religious authority. The article argues that these journals simultaneously reinforced modernizing norms and exposed their contradictions, creating ambivalent spaces in which imperial, national, and social imaginaries overlapped. By situating South Caucasian satire within broader debates on colonial modernity, the study concludes that satirical media played a central role in structuring public discourse, managing moral panic, and articulating contested visions of coexistence in a multiethnic imperial society.