A film about poultry raising can teach much more than poultry raising. It can teach viewers how to work, how to achieve progress, how to trust an ally, and where their nation belongs in the world.

This book is about films often exhibited outside commercial entertainment. They appeared in schools, village squares, prisons, hospitals, military bases, factories, churches, libraries, and sometimes cinemas. They taught people how to use tractors, prevent disease, improve homes, see roads and dams as signs of progress, support family planning, identify communism as a threat, and love the nation.

Governments, missionaries, schools, aid agencies, international organizations, militaries, corporations, researchers, and states used films to teach, persuade, measure, and govern. Film allowed them to negotiate relationships, reduce geopolitical risks, and advance divergent agendas under the language of education and modernization.

This approach changes what counts as history, and who has the authority be its protagonist. A film is not only a finished work made by directors, studios, and performers. It is also shaped by sponsors, funders, translators, distributors, exhibitors, researchers, projectionists, teachers, and audiences. Once we follow those agents, film leaves the movie theater and enters ministries, public relations offices, film libraries, mobile projection units, classrooms, churches, hospitals, prisons, village squares, military bases, and government buildings.

Film Diplomacy gives a name and a framework to that process.

I define film diplomacy as the use of film by institutional agents to communicate strategic messages to local and foreign publics, build relationships, implement policies, and develop infrastructures. These agents often wanted different things. A missionary could use film to circulate Christian values. A US official could use it to promote anticommunism, capitalist development, and admiration for the American way of life. A Turkish official could use it to consolidate secular nationalism and produce loyal citizens. UNESCO could use it to promote audiovisual education as a path to peace and security. Teachers could use it to hold students' attention.

Collaboration did not require shared goals. Film allowed institutions to work together while pursuing divergent, sometimes competing, agendas.

The book traces educational films in Turkey and US-Turkey relations from 1930 to 1986. Its central claim is that, as part of a geopolitical phenomenon, educational films became pivotal tools for advancing different institutional agendas within a modernization project fundamentally structured by whiteness.

My first intervention is conceptual. Film diplomacy has often been used descriptively. I turn it into an analytical framework. I follow the full life cycle of a film: production, sponsorship, translation, distribution, exhibition, and reception. A film's meaning emerges through all these stages. A translation can soften one ideology and bring in another. A mobile projector can create the conditions to turn a village into a Cold War laboratory. A film catalog can organize a worldview. An audience survey can transform viewers' reactions into data for policy and communication strategy.

My second intervention is historical. I show that educational film was central to the relationship between Turkey and the United States. Cold War histories often focus on military bases, aid packages, and political leaders. My book reconstructs that relationship through film reels, projectors, film libraries, classroom guides, mobile cinema units, reception studies, and bureaucratic correspondences. These materials made US-Turkey relations concrete, something to teach in classrooms, screen in villages, circulate through libraries, and measure through audience surveys.

My third intervention is critical. I consider whiteness as a lens through which an invisible regime of power, norms, and evaluation shaped the modernization project. Whiteness was not only on the screen. It operated through funding, selection, translation, distribution, exhibition, research, and policy. It functioned as an unmarked norm, a benchmark of civilization, progress, rationality, and benevolence against which societies were measured.

American films made modernity look Western, white, and benevolent. Societies marked as nonwhite, non-Western, or not-yet-white appeared as unfinished and in need of guidance. This logic sustained a Cold War order in which the United States and its allies positioned themselves as necessary to the development of so-called Third World nations, even as solidarity movements challenged Western paternalism. Turkey became a key example, a nation imagined as capable of becoming modern through US leadership.

Turkish modernity was performed through affiliation with global whiteness. I link Turkishness to global whiteness to show how Turkish whiteness became a claim to civilization, Western identity, and modern statehood. This was not only a desire for acceptance by the international community. It was also a strategic maneuver. By aligning itself with global whiteness, Turkish elites asserted its place as a modern, secular, Western-facing state.

In Turkish films, modernization often required a unified national identity: modern, white, Sunni Muslim, Istanbul Turkish-speaking, able-bodied, heterosexual, and loyal to the state. That image erased or absorbed Afro-Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Alevis, Laz, Zazas, Circassians, and others. Whiteness, in this context, was performative, exclusionary, evolving, and institutionalized.

This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them. They compared the screen with their own lives. They questioned, ignored, adapted, laughed, resisted, and sometimes saw the contradictions more clearly than the experts studying them.

Film has helped institutions manage populations and shape public and international relations by making political projects feel practical, benevolent, necessary, and desirable. A useful film carries more than a lesson. It carries a theory of the world.

Ongoing thread. More from Ayşehan Jülide Etem to follow.