“Surprised and Dazzled with the Beauty of the Sultan’s Capital”: Depoliticization and Dehistoricization of Culture in Demetra Vaka-Brown’s Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women

Date

2017-01-01

Author

Öztabak Avcı, Elif

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

219
views

0
downloads

n this paper, Demetra Vaka-Brown’s representation of “Turkish women” in her personal narrative, Haremlik (1909), after her re-encounter with them at the beginning of the twentieth century will be explored. It will be argued that the writer’s hold on her (cultural) identity as a GreekOttoman woman does not serve a “political” function despite her claim to the contrary; through Haremlik, Vaka-Brown attempts to write her own (personal) (hi)story rather than a collective story of “Turkish women” at the beginning of the twentieth century. The analysis of her narrative will mainly draw on Edward Said’s Orientalism and Arif Dirlik’s critique of depoliticization as well as dehistoricization of culture in his article, “Literature/Identity: Transnationalism, Narrative and Representation.”

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/79695
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/493375

Journal

Kare Dergi: Karşılaştırmalı Edebiyat Dergisi

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The constitution of the female subject in Emma and the proud woman (Mağrur Kadin) Alparslan, Ebru Didem; Çileli, Fatma Meral; Department of Media and Cultural Studies (2012) The main aim of this thesis is to analyze the constitution of the female subjectivity in the novels, Emma by Jane Austen and The Proud Woman (Mağrur Kadın) by Muazzez Tahsin Berkand, through the discourse of romance and within the discursive features of the narratives reflecting their time and cultures. The reflections of modernity are also analyzed in both texts in relation to the life styles and the representations of the male and female characters. This thesis deals with the issue of romance and romantic...
Petty commodity production in agriculture cannot survive without women’s labour: from the standpoint of rural women’s life experiences in Turkey Baturoğlu Balcı, Ülkü; Ecevit, Mehmet C.; Department of Gender and Women's Studies (2019) This thesis analyses women’s distinctive and subjective resistance and/or adaptation characteristics to neoliberal transformations towards their own and household/family lives on the basis of the field research conducted in a village in Western Black Sea in Turkey from the approach of Feminist Standpoint Theory as a contemporary feminist critical theory. The thesis argues that such an analysis is helpful to understand the specificities of subjectivities of rural women, which is critical in grasping rural wo...
Construction and deconstruction of the nation and nationality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s an artist of the floating world and the remains of the day / Doğru Bakar, Hilal; Öztabak Avcı, Elif; Department of English Literature (2014) This thesis focuses in a comparative manner on the ways in which the nation and nationality are foregrounded as constructs in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989). The ways in which Ishiguro’s novels construct and deconstruct “Japaneseness” and “Englishness” will be explored in the light of the theories of Benedict Anderson and Homi K. Bhabha. The thesis will also focus on imperial national identity formation of the unreliable narrators in these novels, b...
The Russian Avant-Garde, and Radikal Modernism (Book Review) Pamir Dietrich, Ayşe (2017-01-01) This book is a collection of articles on the Russian Avant-Garde and Radical Modernism which give the reader a historical perspective on the last phase of the modernist creative history of the Russian Avant-Garde. Divided into six chapters, this collaborative work begins with a section that provides background information on the Russian Avant-Garde and Radical Modernism. In the first two decades of the 20th century developments in Russia created a climate favorable to revolutionary ideas which, in turn, he...
From postmodernism to metamodernism: changing perspectives towards irony and metanarratives in Julian Barnes’s a history of the world in 10 and ½ chapters and the noise of time Ateş, Meltem; Öztabak Avcı, Elif; Department of English Literature (2019) The aim of this thesis is to point out and explore the changing perspectives towards irony and metanarratives in Julian Barnes’s fiction by focusing specifically on A History of the World in 10 and ½ Chapters (1989) and The Noise of Time (2016). This discussion will be located into the larger framework of Postmodernism and Metamodernism. These two aesthetic movements will be discussed in terms of their different approaches to irony and metanarratives in order to contextualize the changes in the ways in whic...

Citation Formats

E. Öztabak Avcı, ““Surprised and Dazzled with the Beauty of the Sultan’s Capital”: Depoliticization and Dehistoricization of Culture in Demetra Vaka-Brown’s Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women,” Kare Dergi: Karşılaştırmalı Edebiyat Dergisi, pp. 18–28, 2017, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/79695.