NUMBER 38 FALL 2013 transnational Feminisms

JAST JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES OF TURKEY

t ransnational Feminisms

NUMBER 38 FALL 2013

Journal of American Studies of Turkey A semiannual publication of the American Studies Association of Turkey, Journal of American Studies of Turkey operates with a blind peer referee system. It publishes transdisciplinary work in English by scholars of any nationality on American literature, history, art, music, film, popular culture, institutions, politics, economics, geography, and related subjects. Contributors need not be members of the American Studies Association of Turkey. Articles which cross conventional borders between academic disciplines are particularly welcome, as are comparative studies of American and other cultures. The journal also publishes notes, comments, book and film reviews. Details about the submission of manuscripts are given at the back. The American Studies Association of Turkey disclaims responsibility for statements, whether of fact or opinion, made by contributors. The American Studies Association of Turkey was founded in 1988 to promote American Studies in Turkey and where possible to assist Turkish and non-Turkish scholars working in the field by providing material and funds. It also aims to further research and publication in Turkish-American comparative studies. Enquiries concerning applications for membership should be addressed to the Office of the Secretary, American Studies Association of Turkey, Cinnah Caddesi 20, TAD Binası Kat 4 Oda 48, Kavaklıdere, Ankara, Turkey. American Studies of Turkey Board Members for 2010-2013 President Vice-President Secretary Treasurer Members

: Meldan Tanrısal, Hacettepe University, Ankara : Tanfer Emin Tunç, Hacettepe University, Ankara : Özlem Uzundemir, Çankaya University, Ankara : Pembe Gözde Erdoğan, Hacettepe University, Ankara : Ahmet Beşe, Atatürk University, Erzurum : Cem Kılıçarslan, Hacettepe University, Ankara : Zafer Parlak, İzmir University, İzmir

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) yaygın süreli bir yayın olup, 6 ayda bir İngilizce olarak yayımlanmaktadır. Yayın sahibi : Türkiye Amerikan Etüdleri Derneği adına Bergüzar Meldan TANRISAL Sorumlu Yazı İşleri Müdürü : Özlem UZUNDEMİR ©2013, The American Studies Association of Turkey. Journal of American Studies of Turkey has been indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory, and the American Humanities Index since the publication of its first issue of Spring 1995, and in the MLA Directory of Periodicals since 1999. Publisher: On behalf of the American Studies Association. President, Meldan Tanrısal Editor in Chief: Özlem Uzundemir Address of ASAT: Cinnah Caddesi No:20, Oda 48, Kavaklıdere, Ankara, Turkey Printed by Alp Ofset Matbaacılık Ltd. Şti. Ankara, Turkey Copies and Date: 150 copies, November 2013

ISSN 1300-6606

Yayın Sahibi: Türkiye Amerikan Etüdleri Derneği Adına, Meldan Tanrısal Sorumlu Yazı İşleri Müdürü: Özlem Uzundemir Yayın İdare Adresi: Cinnah Caddesi, No: 20, Oda 48, Kavaklıdere, Ankara Basıldığı Yer ve Matbaa: Alp Ofset Matbaacılık Ltd. Şti. Ankara Baskı ve Basım Tarihi: 150 adet, Kasım 2013

Journal of American Studies of Turkey Editor-in-Chief Özlem Uzundemir Çankaya University, Ankara Editor Laurence Raw Başkent University, Ankara

Associate Editor Berkem Gürenci Sağlam Başkent University, Ankara

Film Review Editors Berkem Gürenci Sağlam Sema Taşkın Bilkent University, Ankara

Book Review Editor Mehmet Ali Çelikel Pamukkale University

Editorial Board Nur Gökalp Akkerman Hacettepe University, Ankara

Martin Halliwell University of Leicester, UK

Anthony Bak Buccitelli Pennsylvania State University

Aleksandra Izgarjan University of Novi Sad, Serbia

Gert Buelens Ghent University, Belgium Roger Chapman Palm Beach Atlantic University Nicholas J. Cull University of Southern California Philip Davies De Montfort University, UK Gerald Duchovnay Texas A&M University, Commerce David N. Eldridge University of Hull, UK David Espey University of Pennsylvania Barış Gümüşbaş Hacettepe University, Ankara

Will Kaiser Jacksonville University Ayse Lahur Kırtunç Emeritus, Ege University, İzmir Elisabetta Marino University of Rome Manav Ratti Salisbury University, Maryland Atilla Silkü Ege University, İzmir Meldan Tanrısal Hacettepe University, Ankara Michelle Tokarczyk Goucher College, Baltimore

Eric Gruver Texas A&M University, Commerce

Tanfer Emin Tunç Hacettepe University, Ankara

Perin Gürel University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Eduardo B. Vasconcelos Universidade Estadual de Goiás, Brazil

.

List of Contributors M. Dominique Cadinot is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies (Département d’Etudes du Monde Anglophone-DEMA) at the University of Aix-Marseille (France) where he teaches courses in American history. His research focuses on the development of transnationalities and religious conversion. He has written and co-directed a number of publications on the Arab American community and on racial and ethnic dynamics in the United States. Inderpal Grewal is Chair and Professor of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and Faculty in the South Asia Council, and Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, and Affiliate Faculty in American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. She is author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Duke, 1996), and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke, 2005). She is co-editor (with Caren Kaplan) of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGraw Hill, 2001/2005). Her areas of research include feminist theory, cultural studies of South Asia and its diasporas, and contemporary global feminist movements. She also writes opinion blogs for The Huffington Post, and was one of the founders of Narika, a Berkeley, California, based non-profit working to end family violence in the South Asian community. Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies and affiliated faculty in Cultural Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Duke, 1996) and the co-author and coeditor of Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (McGrawHill, 2001/2005), Between Woman and Nation: Transnational Feminisms and the State (Duke, 1999), and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minnesota, 1994) as well as two digital multi-media scholarly works, Dead Reckoning and Precision Targets. Her current research focuses on aerial views and militarized visual culture. Katherine Lashley teaches writing at Towson University and Harford Community College.  She is completing her PhD in English at Morgan State University.  Her areas of interest include postmodern literature and twentieth-century American literature. Nicole Pope is a Swiss journalist and writer based in Istanbul. Over the past two decades, her articles have been published in a number of international publications. She also worked as the Turkey correspondent for the French daily newspaper Le Monde for fifteen years. She currently has a twice-weekly column in the Turkish daily newspaper Today’s Zaman while maintaining a career as an independent analyst and writer. She is the author of Honor Killings in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and the co-author of Turkey Unveiled: a

History of Modern Turkey (Overlook Press, 2011). She holds an MA in International and Community Development. Leila J. Rupp is Professor of Feminist Studies and Associate Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her most recent books are Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women (2009); Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (2003), with Verta Taylor; A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (1999); and Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (1997). She published “The Persistence of Transnational Activism: The Case of the Homophile Movement” in the American Historical Review in 2011, and is coeditor of the seventh, eighth, and ninth editions of Feminist Frontiers. Julia Sattler completed her PhD in American Studies at TU Dortmund University in Germany. She is currently the Academic Director of an international PhD program focusing on “Urban Transformations in the United States” at the University Alliance Metropolis in Ruhr. She has worked on multiple projects relating to poetry and art in public space, and is co-editor and co-translator of a bilingual edition of June Jordan’s Kissing God Goodbye (Weidle Verlag, 2013). Tanfer Emin Tunç is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.  She holds a BA, MA, and PhD in American History from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and specializes in Women’s Studies, American social/cultural history, and Transnational American Studies. She has published extensively on the history of gender, sexuality and reproduction, women’s writing, and cultural studies, and is the author of two books and numerous book chapters and reference book entries; co-editor of four volumes of essays (including The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Turkey and the United States, Peter Lang, 2012); and Lead Editor  of the Journal of Transnational American Studies’ Special Forum on Asian American Studies (Spring/Summer 2012). Her journal articles and book reviews have appeared in internationally-renowned publications such as Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Foreign Literature Studies, Women’s History Review, and Journal of Women’s History. Dr. Tunç is currently the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Alumni Association Turkish Representative; a member of the European Association for American Studies Women’s Caucus Steering Committee; a member of the editorial advisory boards of Medical History and Journal of American Studies of Turkey; and Vice President of the American Studies Association of Turkey.

Journal of American Studies of Turkey Number 38 (Fall 2013)

Table of Contents

Page Number

Jim Welsh (1938-2013): An Appreciation Transnational Feminisms: Guest Editor Tanfer Emin Tunç

Laurence Raw

1

Introduction: Transnational Feminisms

Tanfer Emin Tunç

5

Transnational Feminist Pedagogy: An Interview with Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan

13

“Speaking Truth to Power” in Transnational Feminist History

Leila J. Rupp

19

Turkey’s Weakest Link

Nicole Pope

25

Dominique Cadinot From the Holy Land to the New World (and Back): Transnational Arab Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century

31

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Katherine Lashley

49

“I am she who will be free”: June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics

Julia Sattler

65

Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age.

Jinhua Li

83

The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time

M. Angela Jansen

86

Giovanni Boitani

89

Transnational Feminisms: Book Reviews

Book Reviews Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation

Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel: The Uncensored Book Reviews of Classic Images 2001-2010

Richard Prentiss

93

American Smart Cinema

Steven Rawle

95

Mass Market Medieval

Andrew B. R. Elliott

99

Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens Richard Berger

102

How to be Gay

Abdulhamit Arvas

105

My Culture, My Color, My Self: Heritage, Resilience, and Community in the Lives of Young Adults

Danielle Verena Kollig

108

The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison Nilsen Gökçen

111

Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces

Barry Hudek

114

Fifty Years in Constantinople and Recollections of Robert College

Michael Saffle

117

American-Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture 1830-1980

Feryal Çubukçu

120

Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey

Marcie J. Patton

122

From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey

Joshua Carney

125

Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life

Aysun Kıran

129

The Sounds of Silence: Turkey’s Armenians Speak

E. Melek Çevahiroğlu Onur

132

The İstanbul Review: A Literary Journal

Eda Dedebaş

134

Game of Thrones

Jonathan Stubbs

137

Brave

Wickham Clayton

140

Breathe In

Jennifer Oey

143

Pieta

Patrick Smith

146

Side Effects

William Proctor

148

Moonrise Kingdom

S. Yiğit Soncul

152

Man of Steel

Vincent M. Gaine

154

Elysium

Rachael Kelly

157

Film and Television Reviews

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 1-4

Jim Welsh (1938-2013): An Appreciation Laurence Raw I first encountered Jim on my first academic visit to the United States in 2002, when I attended the Literature/Film Association (LFA) Conference in Carlisle, PA. The environment seemed very familiar to me: downtown Carlisle has that homely feel characteristic of an English provincial town, while Dickinson College is sufficiently compact so that it does not feel intimidating to the visitor. I knew of Jim’s reputation as the founder and co-editor of and one of the mainstays of the LFA. He had been kind enough to publish my first major academic article – a discussion of William Wyler’s film of The Heiress (1949) – in the journal. Needless to say I was very apprehensive about meeting him for the first time. I had no need to worry. One of Jim’s major strengths as an editor and academic was the ability to make even the most timid of colleagues welcome. By the end of the first day I had not only been introduced to many of his close friends (John Tibbetts, Thomas Leitch, Don Whaley), but had been encouraged to ask questions at the end of most papers (a trait which I have not lost to this day). At the end of the event Jim asked me whether I wanted to become involved in one of his (stillborn) projects to collaborate on an encyclopedia for Facts on File, Inc. His capacity to identify and nurture younger talent was legendary; he launched the careers of many an academic, including myself. Through the last two decades Jim had to accommodate himself to fast-changing theoretical developments in adaptation studies. Fidelity became a derisive term, superseded by more up-to-date concepts such as intertextuality and intermediality. I was never quite sure of the extent to which he welcomed these shifts – as a Shakespearean who studied under the wise counsel of Charlton Hinman, literary scholar and editor of the First Folio, he respected the authority of the source-text (especially if it formed part of the English literary canon). Jim often deplored the ways in which such texts were “disrupted” – his term, not mine – by filmmakers

Laurence Raw trying to establish their reputations. Yet paradoxically Jim could be exceptionally broad-minded: one of his favorite recent Shakespeare films was Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), which in his opinion kept to the spirit if not the letter of the source-text, despite its dazzling visual style. Jim had a wide range of interests within adaptation. Although primarily a Shakespearean scholar, he published on American drama and modern adaptation, and with Peter Lev produced The Literature/Film Reader (2007), one of the first major reference-books to appear within the discipline. This book quite literally has something for everyone, from the most dyed-in-thewool supporter of fidelity studies to those who believe that cultures shape the way we understand what adaptation signifies. Jim understood the significance of inclusiveness; if adaptation studies, as well as any form of country studies such as American Studies are going to move forward intellectually, scholars should talk to one another rather than deriding one another’s efforts. On the other hand he could be critical of work he deemed of inferior quality. I remember one dispute he had with a specific journal, where the authors of at least two books took exception to the comments expressed in his reviews. But Jim was not gratuitously malicious, or someone who jealously guarded his reputation. On the contrary he defended himself in such disputes by citing the dictum that criticism should have a moral purpose to encourage writers to produce more considered work in the future. This was part of his philosophy of inclusiveness. Jim was not only an adaptation expert as well as a teacher of American and English Literature; he had an abiding love for Hollywood films of the classical era. In 1968 he encountered John Tibbetts at the University of Kansas, and the two of them became heavily involved in the university film society, where they brought big-name stars to the campus including King Vidor, Jean-Luc Godard and Jonas Mekas. Later on they were involved in the magazine for the National Film Society, an organization dedicated to bringing together lovers of classic Hollywood cinema from all over the United States. They not only managed to interview many stars – whose careers might have otherwise been forgotten – and publish these interviews in the journal, but they invited the stars to the Film Society conferences. Welsh and Tibbetts later collected much of this material in a three-volume anthology (American Classic Screen: Interviews, Profiles, Features), published in 2010. While reminiscing about this initiative, Jim’s expression invariably altered; this was a labor of love as well as a valuable contribution to film history involving people from all walks of life, not just academics. 2

Jim Welsh (1938-2013): An Appreciation As a teacher, Jim preferred traditional methods: the lecture was always preferable to the seminar and/or group activities. On the other hand he embraced new initiatives; we co-edited a two –volume anthology on The Pedagogy of Adaptation (2010) that incorporated pieces from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. Jim contributed a highly suggestive piece looking at the future of Shakespearean pedagogy in a fast-changing academic environment, in which “literature” as a self-contained discipline seemed under perpetual attack from cultural and/or film studies. Jim worked extensively overseas. His two Fulbright stints in Romania were highly successful: some of the students he taught crossed the Atlantic to pursue graduate work and continue their careers in various fields. He visited Turkey twice: on the first occasion as a Fulbright scholar in my own institution where he had to deal with six highly motivated final year undergraduates. I well remember the way in which he sympathetically listened to their future plans while offering practical suggestions as to how such plans might be realized. In a culture where sound advice is often hard to find, his contributions were most welcome. When news filtered through about his passing, my Facebook account was filled with tributes. I only wish that Jim had been around to read them. Jim’s personality was a fascinating blend of tact and outspokenness. Whenever Jim thought things were wrong, especially in a professional context, he said so – sometimes his comments would upset people, but any disputes were soon resolved. He understood the value of talking to people. I remember him as a supreme collaborator, providing inspiration for new ideas and/or initiatives. On one occasion at his house in Salisbury we were discussing adaptation studies in general. His wife Anne had retired to bed, leaving the two of us to share a glass of something. After going round in intellectual circles for a while, we suddenly came up with the idea of treating “adaptation” in much broader terms, not just relating to textual issues but involving all of us. In the next hour I watched Jim’s face gradually lighten as he warmed to the idea – a classic example of Piagetian adaptation in action. At the end of our discussion we felt like Higgins and Eliza in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady; we could have jumped up and sang “You did it!” to one another. However neither of us could sing very well, and we’d have probably woken Anne up anyway. Despite living so far apart – in the United States and Turkey – Jim and I worked closely together for over a decade. I value the fact that he came to conferences to support me (just as I did for him), by asking provocative 3

Laurence Raw questions and spending long evenings discussing adaptive matters. Anne usually came with him; she was very good at deflating his or my flights of academic fancy, if they became too far-fetched. At the end of his life, he and I shared a particular bond; Jim not only served as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey, but both of us suffered from cancer and were thus able to share our experiences. Jim deserves to be remembered not just as a scholar, teacher and academic impresario (launching the careers of others) but as a mate – to use the colloquial term beloved by my family. Wherever you are, Jim, I raise my glass to you. Works Cited The Heiress. Dir. William Wyler Dir. William Wyler. Perf. Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson. Paramount Pictures, 1949. Film. My Fair Lady. Dir. Moss Hart Perf. Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Wilfrid Hyde White. New York, Mark Hellinger Theatre, 1956. Theatre Performance. Raw, Laurence. “Reconstructing Henry James: (1949).” Literature/ Film Quarterly 30.4 (2002): 243-49. Print. Raw, Laurence, James M. Welsh and Dennis Cutchins, eds. The Pedagogy of Adaptation. Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010. Print. __. Redefining Adaptation Studies. Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010. Print. Welsh, James M., and Peter Lev, eds. The Literature/ Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2007. Print. Welsh, James M., and John Tibbetts, eds. American Classic Screen: Features. Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010. Print. -----. American Classic Screen: Interviews. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010. Print.

4

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 5-12

Introduction: Transnational Feminisms Tanfer Emin Tunç Over the past decade, transnationalism as a concept has revolutionized numerous fields within the social sciences and humanities, including American Studies and Women’s Studies. As Bahar Gürsel and I outline in the introduction to The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Turkey and the United States, the inclusion of transnational perspectives in American Studies acquired increased academic attention after Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association in which she “called on scholars to move away from a nationalist and/or nationcentered model of reading, teaching and researching the United States that prioritized the agendas of Americanists working in the United States” (Tunç and Gürsel 11). Her call to arms involved repositioning American Studies as a discipline that takes the transnational, rather than the national, as its point of departure. Such an approach, Fishkin posited, would not only ensure the “multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and goods,” but would also, in the process, generate “social, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads” that would enrich our understanding of America and its global impact (Fishkin 21–22). Expanding on Fishkin’s initial project, Winfried Fluck added a new dimension to transnational American Studies by connecting it to a threeprong approach: one that escaped the legacy of American exceptionalism by examining the impact of the United States on other nations through increased international dialogue and collaboration; one that redefined American Studies as “transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric [and] even global” (23); and one that reformulated American Studies as a field in constant flux. In other words, transnational American Studies, as these scholars envision it, is a field that transcends borders and mere comparative approaches by recognizing bias (especially of US-based Americanists) as well as the work conducted by Americanists beyond the borders of the United States. Above all, this approach involves “the recognition that non-

Tanfer Emin Tunç American scholars, working outside the geographical boundaries of the US, have just as much to contribute to American Studies as those within its borders” (Tunç and Gürsel 13), and the notion that some of the richest areas of research within the discipline are located beyond the physical United States, in the interstitial worlds created by American expatriates, for example. More importantly, however, this approach simultaneously stresses that transdisciplinarity and transnationalism are, by necessity, mutually inclusive. It asserts the fundamental idea that in order to understand the ways in which the United States functions globally, one must comprehend its international social, cultural, economic and historic expressions and formulations. As such, transnational American Studies embraces a wide array of epistemologies, ranging from film studies, to literary criticism, to material culture, to ethnic, racial and Women’s Studies, all of which are explored, within the Turkish American context, in The Transnational Turn in American Studies, and within the Asian American context in “Redefining the American in Asian American Studies: Transnationalism, Diaspora and Representation,” a special forum I co-edited with Elisabetta Marino and Daniel Y. Kim for the Journal of Transnational American Studies. The “transnational turn” in Women’s Studies actually predates the “transnational turn” in American Studies by almost two decades. Transnational Feminism traces its roots to what, in the 1980s, was called “Third World” feminism. Led by Chicana lesbian-feminists Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga in the US as an alternative to the white, middle class, western-oriented, America-centric women’s activism of the 1960s and 70s, Third World feminism drew on the writing of postcolonial and subaltern theorists in order to establish a new framework for those who remained unrepresented in mainstream American feminism — namely, working class women, immigrant women, women of color, lesbian/bisexual/ transgendered women, and women hailing from the Third World (or what is today called the “developing world”) (Rosen 289–290). The agenda of Third World feminists focused on issues of race and ethnicity, and, in particular, sexual, economic, and cultural exploitation. Third World feminism exposed the elision/misrepresentation of women living beyond the borders of the “First World” and prioritized the issues affecting the lives of such unrepresented women. Moreover, Third World feminism sought to deconstruct umbrella terms such as “woman” and “feminism” into a spectrum of women, each with a multiple consciousness, who could 6

Introduction: Transnational Feminisms embrace an infinitesimal number of feminisms (Anzaldua and Moraga). Furthermore, it rejected the conflation of “Third World” women into one indiscernible (poor/marginalized) group, stressed that feminism is an individual, lived experience, and acknowledged the factors that unite, and divide, women (Mohanty). Third World feminism’s transition into what in the 1990s came to be known as Global Feminism was catalyzed by its adoption by American “Third Wave” feminists who were particularly critical of the lack of diversity of preceding women’s movements. Like Third World feminists, they openly acknowledged that women hail from a variety of backgrounds, that the cookie-cutter (and often heterosexist) activism of previous generations could not possibly begin to address concerns such as domestic violence, sexual abuse, reproductive freedom, economic equity, and educational and employment rights, which impacted women from different backgrounds differentially (Rosen 276–277). Like Third World feminists, Third Wave feminists, such as Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, and Rebecca Walker (daughter of novelist Alice Walker and goddaughter of Gloria Steinem) rejected essentialist notions that collapsed women into universal categories and binaries (Baumgardner and Richards; Walker). This idea, for many American feminists, served as the theoretical bridge between Third World feminism and Global (also known as world or international) Feminism, which rose to prominence during the 1990s through notable women’s conferences and events including Lilith Fair and the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), which included a notable speech on the international status of women by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was the American First Lady at the time (Rosen 340–344). However, Global Feminism soon fell out of favor because many feminists were troubled by certain strands of the movement which espoused a “world-wide alliance of women.” This idealized and rather utopic notion of sisterhood, they believed, invariably lapsed into the same tropes of western condescension, paternalism, and cultural imperialism found in preceding feminist movements. A new model was needed, and thus Transnational Feminism was born. Transnational Feminism, unlike previous feminist movements, emphasizes transnationality; specifically, the interstices, overlaps, and junctures that impact women’s lives both within their own nations and across national borders. Moreover, it stresses concepts such as race, 7

Tanfer Emin Tunç ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, immigration, mobility, globalization, hybridity, hyphenatedness, and diasporic identity while critiquing the impact that capitalism has had on these formations and on the political, social and economic conditions of women’s lives. Like Third World feminism, it draws heavily on postcolonial, subaltern, and more recent feminist theory (especially texts by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, Lisa Lowe, Ella Shohat, Gayatri Spivak, Leila J. Rupp, Reina Lewis and Cynthia Enloe) and targets oppressive, hegemonic institutions, especially those which stem from the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, while it encourages collaboration by women across borders, it simultaneously acknowledges, and exposes, the inherent inequalities and power struggles that can emerge from such relationships. Transnational Feminism though an American Studies lens seeks to assess the impact of American feminisms abroad and the ways in which non-American feminisms have played out in the United States. Like transnational American Studies, it prioritizes the scholarship of individuals working beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States, and examines the ways in which American feminisms have been adopted and adapted by women in other nations to suit their local contexts. While it certainly espouses feminist collaboration across borders, it intentionally avoids declarations of a “worldwide sisterhood,” since most self-indentified transnational feminists do not believe that such an alliance is possible (due to the differences among women) or even desirable. Moreover, much like scholars working in transnational American Studies, those working in Transnational Feminism also seek to deconstruct tropes such as American exceptionalism, western condescension, paternalism, cultural imperialism, and the “white woman’s burden” that accompanied previous global feminist movements. Transnational Feminism represents a fundamental break with the past because it is essentially a paradigm shift away from orientalist and colonial discourses that prioritize “the West” and that marginalize the social, cultural, and historical contexts with which women struggle elsewhere in the world. In other words, Transnational Feminism signals a movement towards examining how “western” countries, such as the United States, are, for better or worse, implicated in global issues that impact women’s lives and how these issues can be broached. Over the past decade, Transnational Feminism has established itself as a significant discipline within Women’s Studies and has thus become an 8

Introduction: Transnational Feminisms integral part of academic scholarship and college-level courses. However, according to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, authors of one of the earliest, and arguably most influential, Transnational Feminist textbooks, An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World (2001), “transnational feminist studies is not a luxury that is added to the end of a syllabus or that can be relegated to one week out of the semester or quarter” (xvii). Transnationalism, they argue, should be integrated into all contemporary feminist discourse — whether through academic writing, in the classroom setting, or within the realm of activism — so that important questions are asked, and answered, about “ethnocentrism, racism, and nationalist viewpoints as foundation[s] to gender identity and issues of sexuality” (xvii). Numerous scholars have heeded their call, and the call of others working in the fields of Transnational Feminism and transnational American Studies, as evidenced by the explosion of academic scholarship in these fields and their overlapping subsets. Some recent notable texts include Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite, and Diane Lichtenstein’s Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies (2011); Nadine Naber’s Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism (2012); Kimberly A. Williams’s Imagining Russia: Making Feminist Sense of American Nationalism in US–Russian Relations (2012); Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner’s The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (2012) (reviewed in this issue); and Leela Fernandes’s Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power (2013). One text that distinguishes itself for incorporating transatlantic and hemispheric American Studies alongside Transnational Feminism is Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton’s Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (2012). A collection of primary sources from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this volume includes documents written by men and women, slave and free, which argue not only for women’s liberation but also human liberation. Including poets such as Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, early women’s rights activists such as Judith Sargent Murray, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Olympe de Gouges, and women whose feminist sensitivities were usurped by more urgent political, religious, or racial concerns (e.g., Abigail Adams, Anne Hutchinson, and Native American women such as Katherine Garret, Molly Brant, and Nancy 9

Tanfer Emin Tunç Ward), this collection not only transcends nation, forging an important lineage for contemporary transnational feminist texts, but, in the process, also compels readers to rethink the definition of Transnational Feminism. Focusing on women’s experiences in the age of numerous revolutions (American, French, Haitian and others), this collection recuperates many of the lost voices of Transnational Feminism through the lens of nationbuilding and war. As the editors contend, these voices circulated freely in the Atlantic region and its surrounding areas (e.g., Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean), representing a transnational feminist intellectual network, or Age of Enlightenment, that intertwined with the male-dominated Age of Reason in Europe and the United States, and predated the contemporary transnational feminist movement by centuries. This special issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey thus represents an important intervention in Transnational Feminist studies — one that not only presents an overview and assessment of the field (past, present and future) by key scholars and activists, but also offers a glimpse into some of the innovative work that is currently being conducted in the field both within, and beyond, the physical geography of the United States. This issue also provides insight into the impact that American feminisms have had globally, how they can be reconfigured in other settings, and how non-American feminisms have shaped women in the United States. Furthermore, this issue opens up space for new dialogue, particularly about diaspora and (de)nationalization, the intersections between the different strands of Transnational Feminism, and the sort of feminist work that still needs to be done in Turkey and other countries in the region. It is divided into four sections, beginning with an interview with two pioneers in the field of Transnational Feminism, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, who discuss the reception of their groundbreaking textbook as well as their pedagogic experiences with Transnational Feminism. The second section of this issue includes two essays. The first, by Leila J. Rupp, is an assessment of the lessons that the history of the transnational women’s movement can offer to contemporary Transnational Feminism. The second essay, by journalist Nicole Pope, examines women’s status in Turkey and summarizes the gains that women need to make in order to broach equality in Turkish society. Part three of this issue includes three articles, or examples, of the sort of innovative academic research that is occurring in the field. While 10

Introduction: Transnational Feminisms Dominique Cadinot’s article analyzes the interaction between Arab (specifically Syrian) and American feminists during the early twentieth century from an historic perspective, Katherine Lashley and Julia Sattler examine Transnational Feminism through a literary lens. Specifically, Lashley focuses on the tensions between religious identity, national identity, and feminism, as well as the body politics of the Muslim world in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. Sattler investigates the transnational feminist poetics of African American author June Jordan and the ways in which she used her works to expose the oppression of global “Others.” The final section of book reviews includes evaluations of some key texts in the field, rounding out what is positioned to be a memorable issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey. Works Cited Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Print. Fernandes, Leela. Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Print. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17–57. Print. Fluck, Winfried. “Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need?” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007): 23–32. Print. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print. Kahf, Mohja. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12.3/13.1 (1984): 333–58. Print. Moore, Lisa L., Joanne Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton, eds., Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. 11

Tanfer Emin Tunç Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981. Print. Naber, Nadine. Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism. New York: NYU Press, 2012. Print. Orr, Catherine M., Ann Braithwaite, Diane Lichtenstein, eds. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Print. Pratt, Geraldine, and Victoria Rosner, eds. The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Print. Tunç, Tanfer Emin, Elisabetta Marino and Daniel Y. Kim, eds. “Redefining the American in Asian American Studies: Transnationalism, Diaspora and Representation” (Special Forum on Asian American Studies). Journal of Transnational American Studies 4.1 (2012). Web. 22 Sep. 2013. -----. and Bahar Gürsel, eds. The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Turkey and the United States. Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2012. Print. Walker, Rebecca. “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms., Jan/Feb. 1992, 39–41. Print. Williams, Kimberly A. Imagining Russia: Making Sense of American Nationalism in US-Russian Relations. Albany: State U. of New York Press, 2012. Print. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the authors for their important contributions, the anonymous peer reviewers for their input and suggestions, and JAST editors Laurence Raw and Özlem Uzundemir for their support of this issue.

12

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 13-17

Transnational Feminist Pedagogy: An Interview with Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan Q: Your influential textbook An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World represents a major intervention in Women’s Studies pedagogy. What was the inspiration for this remarkable work and how was it received by the academic community? IG & CK: In the mid to late 1980s, as feminists working in postcolonial studies in the US, we saw gaps in both fields. In postcolonial studies, the gaps came from a very territorially circumscribed approach to the nation-state stemming from the United States’ Cold War articulation of “area studies” as a project to extend knowledge of other nation-states and expand spheres of influence and power. There was little about diasporas, global movements, mobile populations and nations. In addition, the “development feminism” approach also was contained in such a bounded state and did not engage with the histories of colonialism through which geopolitical asymmetries constructed the “third world” or the “developing world.” In feminist studies, the gaps came from American exceptionalist nationalism in relation to the subject of woman as well as any other forms of social difference. This notion of exceptionalism saw feminism as an American project and saw international issues in relation to US and European feminism expanding from the “West to the Rest.” It was a moment in which neoliberalism as a new “western” imperial project was being constructed and we wanted to ensure that Women’s Studies students in the US were able to think through what it might mean to live in this new empire as well as its rearticulating relations to a changing world. The reception to the textbook was initially quite mixed and we think it remains so. First of all, much of the teaching in Women’s Studies begins with what is called “Second Wave” feminism and continues on to trace social and political movements for the most part, culminating with an emphasis on activism. We thought that the field had evolved to create a rich body of scholarship that was not simply about social movements but rather about a theory of culture and society, and so we began the book

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan with thinking about social and sexual difference. Many do not accept this approach. Reception was also mixed because there is a huge unexamined attachment to nation that exists even within Women’s Studies, and we think this is very difficult to understand especially since nation itself and nationalisms are always changing — morphing, perhaps. There remains a huge emphasis in popular and academic culture — its collaboration actually — which produces the individual woman as a universal figure whose histories are unexamined. Many see our approach as insufficiently “resistant” since it does not construct a revolutionary gendered subject. Those who have been inspired by our approach want to critique both “Area” and “American” studies in relation to their Cold War formations, and want to explore a feminist critique of empire and an ahistorical approach to globalization. We wanted to show that gender is an historical and geographical project that creates difference through interconnections. Empires are one sort of interconnection. Another objection to our book is from those who think it is too “American” and these are the people who want to think about how to teach transnational feminist approaches from other regions. We did plan the book with our particularly located classrooms in the US in mind, but we do think that our approach can be useful to design a Women’s Studies course that might be located in other places — and we know this has been the case for many who use the book. All of the responses to the textbook illuminate the many uneven circulations and connections of the world we live in and how difficult it is to address power in these circumstances. Q: In the introduction to your textbook, you state that “transnational feminist studies is not a luxury that is added to the end of a syllabus or that can be relegated to one week out of the semester or quarter.” What are some pedagogic techniques and approaches that you have taken to actuate this epistemology? IG & CK: The point is that our approach is integrative and methodological/theoretical and so it has to be integrated into understanding the world. It is an analytical critique of how to think about the world, rather than how to carve up the world into thematic units. We don’t start with a social movement in a particular region (e.g., Second Wave feminism in the US) but with deconstructing the fundamental unit of our field, which is sex 14

Transnational Feminist Pedagogy and sex difference. We also think about how this exists in connection with race, nationalism, religion, and colonialisms. Q: What would you suggest (in terms of texts, audio/visual materials, etc.) for someone creating a Transnational Feminism course from scratch? What has worked/not worked for you in the past? IG & CK: Starting a course from scratch might begin with thinking about what the animating critique of nationalism, internationalism, and gender might be in a particular context. Other questions: Is this to be done in a large scale or a more pointed seminar? What are some of the urgent challenges facing the students that might make this material relevant to their everyday and working lives? What are some of the key issues that make Women’s Studies relevant to the location of the classroom? In our context of the Women’s Studies classroom in the US, in the midst of major sexuality and transgender social movements, the students love this book because it opens up these issues, but they also request more recent materials on this topic. The most difficult section to teach is the political theory unit, which many students seem to find very boring, but which we believe is key to the project. Understanding how liberal notions of selfhood have become hardwired into all democratic projects globally, and how public-private divides are being created in related but different ways, is critically important. Another major intervention made by the book which students have to struggle to learn is the nature of modernity and how modernities globally are different but connected. Q: How has the Women’s Studies classroom changed over the past decade? IG & CK: It is difficult to separate the Women’s Studies classroom from the push to privatize public education that is now a terrain of struggle for many students and faculty in the US. While in the past, many middleclass students were able to attend college full time, now many are parttime students or working jobs while attending college. This affects how much time they put into their studies and their preparation for college. Increasingly, lower income students are losing opportunities to go to college at all, or their education is becoming virtual, without much contact with 15

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan faculty, discussion, or engagement with classmates. Much of this change is also connected to the devastating impact of global finance capital and new regimes of empire and war. This also means that education is now geared towards getting a job, rather than gaining knowledge and competencies that would enable students to develop skills of community and democratic participation. Women’s Studies students are seen to be working either towards a professional degree or towards becoming members of NGOs. These two types of goals are both contradictory to the political work that we hoped Women’s Studies would achieve. But we do hope that the book allows students to critique the changing nature of economic, social and political projects everywhere — to be alert to the politics and power of all their workplaces, communities and nations. Q: In addition to Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World, you have also collaborated on a number of other important works in the field of Transnational Feminism. Can you please comment on these texts? IG & CK: We have collaboratively and separately worked on articulating projects that brought postcolonial studies into conversation with race, diaspora and American Women’s Studies. We believe that the dialogical process of collaboration is the best way to do transnational research. Our theorization of “transnationalism” has allowed us to understand the legacies of colonialisms that underlie so many feminist and other social movements. See, for instance, Inderpal’s critique of human rights discourses, or of security regimes, and Caren’s work on militarized visual cultures. Q: What is some of the innovative work that is currently being done in the field of transnational feminist pedagogy? What are some of the most challenging aspects of this work? IG & CK: What is going on in Turkey and in your classrooms is difficult for us to know since neither of us is familiar with teaching in that context. In our contexts, students are diverse, in specific US-ways, in terms of religion, class, race, and ethnicity, which means that there are challenges to using our textbook. We deliberately work against some assumptions 16

Transnational Feminist Pedagogy about gender and feminism that come from popular culture and other knowledges in the US. This means that we are always trying to question knowledges about “other” cultures as well as knowledges that seem to be taken for granted. We seek to examine how mediated our knowledges about gender and women are and we ask students to see gendered subjects as coming from distinct histories. Works Cited Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print.

17

.

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 19-24

“Speaking Truth to Power” in Transnational Feminist History Leila J. Rupp The moments in the history of Transnational Feminism that I find most compelling are those in which women from a variety of cultures can be found “speaking truth to power,” a favorite US progressive concept first advocated by the Religious Society of Friends in the 1950s (“Speak Truth to Power”). Given the dominance of women from the United States, Great Britain, northern and western Europe, and the “neo-Europes” of Australia and Canada in the transnational women’s organizations that flourished from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War, it is not surprising that women from other parts of the world had to fight against feminist orientalist assumptions about a whole range of issues, from the very nature of feminism to the impact of global power dynamics on organizing across national borders (Zonana; Weber, “Unveiling”; Melman; Lewis). Although the context has changed, many of the struggles within the three transnational women’s organizations I researched for my book, Worlds of Women, remain powerfully present today (Rupp). If we listen to the voices of women who challenged the power dynamics within transnational women’s organizations in the past, perhaps we can think more productively about Transnational Feminism in the present. When the organizers of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) congress in 1932 invited a Chinese woman living in Berlin, Chiyin Chen, to come to Grenoble and address the congress briefly in Chinese, she was offended. Responding in German, she pointed out that she could not take the time to “speak for a few minutes in a language that probably all of the congress participants could not understand.” She found this an “unreasonable demand that I cannot reconcile with my self-respect” (Chen). This was speaking truth to power, laying bare the difference between diversity as window-dressing and a real commitment to the inclusion of women from outside the Euro American world. Only since the Second World War have the congresses of the International Council

Leila J. Rupp of Women, the International Alliance of Women, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom ventured outside the United States and North America. When the Alliance met in İstanbul in 1935, the move was lauded as a significant shift to the East. The president of the Union of Turkish Women pointed out that İstanbul was, in fact at “the junction of two continents,” so the location represented a symbolic union of East and West (Bekir). The importance of holding conferences in diverse locations around the world, so that those without resources to travel might attend, and also providing translation into multiple languages, is a given within Transnational Feminism today. This is why the United Nations world conferences on women and their associated gatherings of non-governmental organizations met in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995), and why conferences in the global South attract more diverse participants. At the 1935 İstanbul congress, an unnamed Arab woman explained that “the economic and political situation of my country is so desperate that it is extremely difficult for us women to give our whole-hearted energies to the cause of feminism alone” (“Delegates and Friends”). This was speaking truth to power, foreshadowing the kind of intersectional feminism advocated by scholars such as Chandra Mohanty (Mohanty, Russo and Torres). The Arab woman’s statement suggested that the dominant understanding of feminism was that it addressed only the rights of women, while other ideologies and movements sought to fight imperialism, win national independence, and attain economic security. This is what Francisca de Haan, in her work on the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the progressive and left-feminist organization founded in Paris in 1945, critiques as the concept of “gender-only feminism” (de Haan; Withuis; Laville; Garner; Pojmann). De Haan takes to task not only the mainstream transnational women’s organizations, but scholars of Transnational Feminism, myself included, as well. That is, she argues that groups such as the WIDF should be considered part of Transnational Feminism and that the WIDF’s multi-issue feminism and intersectional approach give lie to the idea that gender-only feminism is the most advanced or the only true form of feminism. While I agree entirely that WIDF is an important part of the story of Transnational Feminism, I think that until after the Second World War, in the transnational arena, feminism was conceptualized almost entirely as focusing on gender equality. This is not to say that 20

“Speaking Truth to Power” in Transnational Feminist History there were no transnational feminists committed to social justice — there were many, particularly in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. As the world situation deteriorated in the 1930s, with the onset of the Depression, the rise of fascism, and the beginnings of the global conflagration, more and more women in transnational women’s organizations would have agreed with the Arab woman that it was “extremely difficult for us women to give our whole-hearted energies to the cause of feminism alone.” However, that very phrase sets feminism apart from other ideologies and movements. Also at the İstanbul congress, Shareefeh Hamid Ali of India, on behalf of “we of the East,” warned “you of the West that any arrogant assumption of superiority or of patronage on the part of Europe or America, any undue pressure of enforcement of religion or government or of trade or economic ‘spheres of influence’ will alienate Asia and Africa and with it the womanhood of Asia and Africa” (Ali). Two years later, at the WILPF congress, she denounced the pretext that imperial powers civilized backward peoples as “hypocritical and wrong.” “Ethiopians might as well some day pretend to go and civilize Italy, or China to civilize Japan. The civilization of peoples in Africa and Asia may be different from the European, but it has the same right of existence as that of Europe” (Minutes, WILPF). Hers was an especially powerful voice speaking truth to power, questioning the very foundation of European imperialism and, by implication, the assumption that feminism as articulated within the western tradition was free of imperialism and orientalism (Weber, “Between”). Hamid Ali’s criticism of Western imperialism points to a persistent tension in Transnational Feminism: women from the United States and other secure and sovereign nations tended to criticize women from colonized or newly independent countries for being too nationalistic, entirely missing their own nationalist and imperialist commitments. The British president of the International Alliance of Women called Egyptian feminist Huda Sha`rawi, for example, “terrifically nationalist” for her advocacy on the part of the Muslim women of Palestine (Ashby to Catt; Sha`rawi; Badran). In response to a call for a protest against anti-Semitism at the 1939 Board meeting of the International Alliance, Sha`rawi pointed out that Muslims, too, suffered grave indignities and that “the Arab women sharply resent that the Alliance would not come to their aid in protesting the injustices and persecutions that they suffer in Palestine” (Minutes [French]). 21

Leila J. Rupp A similar conflict over nationalism erupted in 1937 when WILPF considered admitting a new Egyptian section. Because of the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, which called for, among other things, occupation by the British until Egypt could defend the Suez Canal, the Egyptian WILPF section supported the formation of an Egyptian national army. Alice Jacot, the Egyptian representative, made clear that they could not accept disarmament until Egypt had the capability to defend itself and that only the complete independence of Egypt, which necessitated an army, would make peace and disarmament possible. “The great imperialist powers […] have often abused their state sovereignty to conduct an egoistic politics dangerous to peace,” she asserted (Jacot to Madame). WILPF, in the end, voted to admit the section, but the incident shows that Egyptian women had a very different perspective than did women from countries with secure national identities and independence and that the Egyptian women spoke truth to power in interactions with the European leadership. These moments within the history of Transnational Feminism resonate with the work of contemporary scholars such as Mohanty, Inderpal Grewal, and Caren Kaplan (Mohanty, Russo and Torres; Grewal and Kaplan). Listening to the voices of women speaking truth to power in the past moves us beyond the concept of a “global sisterhood” to a place where the global dynamics of power must be recognized. Rejecting feminist orientalist discourses that assume a hierarchy in which a western style of gender-only feminism will raise the consciousness of oppressed women, we can work toward a truly intersectional Transnational Feminism. Works Cited Ali, Shareefeh Hamid. “East and West in Co-operation,” 1935, IAW Papers, Box 1, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Print. Ashby, Margery Corbett to Carrie Chapman Catt, 9 Jun. 1926, NAWSA Papers, Reel 11, Library of Congress. Print. Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton UP., 1994. Print. Bekir, Bayan Latife. “Accueil de la Turquie,” Jus Suffragii 29/7, Apr. 1935. Print. 22

“Speaking Truth to Power” in Transnational Feminist History Chen, Chiyin to Anne Zuelbin [German], 14 May 1932, WILPF Papers, Reel 20, Microfilm Edition, Microfilming Corporation of America. Microfilm. de Haan, Francisca. “Eugénie Cotton, Pak-Den-ai and Claudia Jones: Rethinking Transnational Feminism and International Politics.” Journal of Women’s History, forthcoming. -----. “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF).” Women’s History Review 19.4 (2010): 547–73. Print. “Delegates and Friends,” 1935, IAW Papers, Box 1, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Print. Garner, Karen. Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925–1985. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP., 2010. Print. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1994. Print. Jacot, A. to Madame [French], 15 Apr. 1937, WILPF Papers, Reel 3, Microfilm Edition, Microfilming Corporation of America. Microfilm. Laville, Helen. Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations. Manchester: Manchester UP., 2002. Print. Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718– 1918. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Minutes [French], International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship Executive Committee, Copenhagen, 5 Jul. 1939, IAW papers, Fawcett Library, London. Print. Minutes, WILPF Ninth World Congress, Luhacovice, 27–31 Jul. 1937, WILPF Papers, Reel 21, Microfilm Edition, Microfilming Corporation of America. Microfilm. 23

Leila J. Rupp Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Anne Russo, and Lourdes M. Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1991. Print. Pojmann, Wendy. Italian Women and International Cold War Politics, 1944– 1968. New York: Fordham UP. 2013. Print. Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1997. Print. Sha`rawi, Huda. Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist. Trans. Margot Badran. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Print. “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence.” Quaker.org. Web. 30 Apr. 2013. Weber, Charlotte. “Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women’s Congresses of 1930 and 1932.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4.1 (2008): 83–106. Print. -----. “Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950.” Feminist Studies 27 (2001): 125– 57. Print. Withuis, Jolande. Opoffering en Heroiek: De Mentale Wereld van een Communistische Vrouwenorganisatie in Naoorlogs Nederland, 1946– 1976. Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 1990. Print. Zonana, Joyce. “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 592–617. Print.

24

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 25-29

Turkey’s Weakest Link Nicole Pope Turkey has undergone a major transformation in the past decade. The country has progressed economically and emerged as a major strategic player on the regional and international scene. But Turkey still faces significant democratic shortcomings that stand in the way of its global ambitions. One of these problem areas is the country’s persistent gender inequality, which regularly leaves Turkey lagging at the bottom of international gender equality tables, in the company of nations less developed than itself. Turkey was only 124th out of 135 nations assessed on economic, political, education, and health-based criteria by the World Economic Forum for the 2012 edition of its Gender Gap Index (“World Economic Forum”). In health and life expectancy, Turkish women are faring relatively well and in education, the gender gap at the primary school level has nearly closed. But girls are still more likely than boys to drop out of high school and lack of skills keeps women out of the workforce or pushes them into informal and low-paid forms of employment with no social benefits. These obstacles to gender equality, as well as the violence that four Turkish out of ten experience at the hands of husbands or relatives, have begun to be discussed more openly in Turkey. However, the country remains deeply patriarchal. Liberal as far as economic policy is concerned, the current Turkish administration, in line with its electorate, is socially conservative. Yet, it is also pragmatic and some important legislative reforms benefiting women, such the overhaul of the Penal Code which came into force in 2005, and the Law on the Prevention of Violence against Women, adopted in 2012, took place during its tenure. Women’s rights organizations, which have actively been working to raise awareness of Turkey’s gender gap and the widespread violence against women in the country since the mid-1980s, have played a key role

Nicole Pope in shaping legislation. Thanks largely to their efforts, the new Civil Code of 2002 established full equality in marriage between men and women. The matrimonial property regime was also changed, allowing women, in the case of divorce, to be able to acquire an equal share of the assets acquired during marriage. Dozens of feminist groups, organized in a joint platform, successfully lobbied lawmakers to ensure that thirty crucial amendments were made to an initial draft of the Penal Code. Sexual crimes, for instance, which were categorized in the past as “crimes against public morality” are now recognized as crimes against individuals. Awareness of women’s issues, especially of gender-based violence, has improved. However, implementation of the laws remains patchy and colored by traditional social perceptions which have yet to shift significantly. Many judges still interpret legislation from a patriarchal point of view. In 2011, for example, the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld lenient sentences against twenty-six men accused of raping a thirteen year-old girl, arguing that the victim had consented (“Court Ruling”). Professor Yılmaz Esmer of Bahçeşehir University, who conducted a survey of Turkey’s social values in 2012, pointed out that sixty-four percent still believed that a woman should obey her husband, while seventy-six percent, including seventy-one percent of women, thought that fathers should be head of the family (Tahaoğlu, “Türkiye”). In the early 1930s, Turkish women were granted the right to vote and to run for public office, ahead of several western nations. However, the concept of gender equality, although enshrined in the Constitution, never filtered through society. In the following decades, the situation of women regressed on several fronts, including political and labor force participation. As agriculture’s share of GDP declined and more villagers migrated from rural areas to the cities, women’s involvement in the workforce declined. In 1990, female labor force participation stood at thirty-four percent but fifteen years later, it had dropped to twenty-three percent (KEIG). In the past couple of years, positive signals have emerged as more women seek paid employment. However, while labor force participation, which also takes into account women doing unpaid agricultural work, is now close to thirty percent, the urban female employment rate, at around twenty-five percent, remains well below the sixty-two percent average in the European Union (European Commission). The widespread belief that 26

Turkey’s Weakest Link women’s primary role should be as wives and mothers partly explains this disparity. Lack of skills and a limited child and elderly care infrastructure are also significant obstacles. Financial independence is seen as a crucial element to empower Turkish women. Since the mid-1980s, women’s groups have also been fighting against widespread domestic violence and murders committed in the name of “honor.” In recent years, they have campaigned with renewed vigor as murders, fuelled by rapid social change, reached epidemic proportions. In 2012, 165 women were killed by their husband or partner, in most cases because they were seeking a divorce or had left an abusive relationship (Tahaoğlu, “Erkekler”). New legislation to improve protection for women at risk was introduced in 2012. Judges can now swiftly issue injunctions against potential offenders and electronic tags are available to ensure they keep away from potential victims. But the text of the document, prepared by Minister Fatma Şahin in cooperation with women’s groups, was watered down at the last minute to remove mentions of gender equality. According to the Independent Communications Network Bianet, which keeps track of violent incidents through the media, twenty-four of the 165 women murdered in 2012 had turned to the authorities, seeking protection, to no avail. Shaping policy remains largely a male domain, even if women’s share of parliament seats increased to fourteen percent in 2011. The proKurdish BDP is the only party where women have real decision-making power. Across Turkey, the ratio of women involved in local administration is a paltry one percent. For instance, only twenty-six of Turkey’s 2,950 mayors are women and of these fourteen are from the pro-Kurdish party (Ka-Der). Turkey has only one female governor, one female minister, and no ministry is led by a female undersecretary. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has publicly stated that he does not believe in gender equality, because, in his view, men and women have different social roles to fulfill. He regularly praises women as mothers and homemakers, urging them to have at least three children, but he is clearly ambivalent about encouraging them to step out into the public arena. The AKP, which won a third popular mandate with fifty percent of the vote in June 2011 did include female candidates on its lists, but it shunned women wearing the Islamic headscarf, although party leaders 27

Nicole Pope have often criticized a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities and in public places that was enforced by secular Kemalists. In 2011, the renaming of the Ministry for Women and Social Affairs, which became the Ministry for the Family and Social Policy, was seen as indicative of the government’s main focus on the family, rather than on the individuals within it. In 2012, Prime Minister Erdoğan caused uproar when, out of the blue, he launched an attack on abortion and the common use of caesarean sections to deliver babies. Abortion has been legal until ten weeks since 1973 in Turkey and, unlike in the United States, it has not been a much-debated issue. Although the government, facing strong opposition from women’s rights advocates, has shied away from introducing an outright ban on abortion, new regulations currently being prepared are expected to make it much harder for women to obtain legal pregnancy terminations within this time limit. Despite all the obstacles still standing in Turkish women’s way, society is nevertheless changing and women, be they from a secular or religious background, have become more vocal in demanding their rights. Authorities may still promote a traditional view of the family, but Turkey’s economic success under Prime Minister Erdoğan’s leadership and the rising consumerism it has fueled may in fact be undermining traditional lifestyles. The cost of living has risen in a largely urbanized Turkey and the aspirations of the country’s rapidly expanding middle class have evolved, increasing the need for a second salary. Economists have also pointed out that unless Turkey makes better use of its human capital, the country is unlikely to reach its ambitious goal of becoming one of the world’s leading economies by the centenary of the Republic in 1923. Improving the situation of women in Turkey and speeding up the pace of social change requires decisive action on multiple fronts. Politicians may pay lip-service to gender issues, but they have so far shown little willingness to tackle its roots. Turkish women will not be able to exercise fully their rights unless traditional gender roles are challenged. Improved legislation has already given women’s rights defenders important new legal instruments to use in their struggle for gender equality. Better access to childcare would allow more women to seek paid employment. But until society and politicians accept that women are individuals, and not just mothers and wives, and that men should shoulder some of the 28

Turkey’s Weakest Link responsibility for taking care of the household and children, progress will remain slow. Works Cited “Court Ruling of ‘Consent’ Inflicts Most Hurt on Child Rape Victim.” Today’s Zaman, 3 Nov. 2011. Web. 23 Feb. 2013. European Commission Press Release, “Progress in Gender Equality Leads to Economic Growth.” 12 Apr. 2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2013. Ka-Der (Association for the Support of Women Candidates), 2012 Statistics. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. KEIG (Women’s Labor and Employment Initiative Platform) Report, “Genelgenın Ardından Istihdamda Kadının Durumu Araştırması.” Nov. 2012. Web. 23 Feb. 2013. Tahaoğlu, Çiçek. “Erkekler 2012’de 165 Kadın Oldürdü, 150 Kadına Tecavüz Etti.” Bianet, 10 Jan. 2013. Web. 22 Feb 2013. -----. “Türkiye Değerlerın Atlası’nda Kadın Değerleri.” Bianet, 28 Dec. 2012. Web. 22 Feb. 2013. “World Economic Forum, Gender Gap Index 2012,” 23 Oct. 2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2013.

29

.

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 31-47

From the Holy Land to the New World (and Back): Transnational Arab Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century Dominique Cadinot In his most famous work, The Syrians in America (1924), historian Philip Khuri Hitti, expert in Islamic Studies, and pioneer of the academic study of Semitic languages ​​and Arab culture in the United States, wrote: “Syria has always been an inhospitable place to live in and a splendid place to leave” (49). Through this humorous note, he expressed the dilemma faced by many his fellow citizens, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, reluctantly made the decision to flee their homeland. A Maronite Syrian Christian, Hitti was in fact recounting the story of the Christian communities who lived under the yoke of Ottoman imperialism. Inhospitality, at the time, resulted partly from the inferior status that such Christians had been forced to endure by the Ottoman governors since the sixteenth century. However, in the first decades of the twentieth century, geopolitical frictions were also compelling many people in the Near East to venture abroad. The Syrian provinces of the empire were indeed chronically beleaguered by religious strife, much of which European nations instigated. Whereas the French vied for control of the Catholic congregations and the Maronites in particular, the British supported the Druze community. Would-be immigrants were therefore initially torn by conflicting feelings: should they remain in the Holy Land, the cradle of their heritage but also the theater of their misfortune; or, should they travel westward across oceans and hope to find a better fate? This choice was even more complicated for women. Because they came into contact with American Protestant missionaries, Syrian women were exposed to new patterns of behavior and observed, with interest, the dynamics of gender relations in missionary organizations. More precisely, the promotion of the American middle-class ideology of domesticity alongside the paradoxical yet inevitable transgression of traditional boundaries by female missionaries

Dominique Cadinot encouraged, among indigenous women, emancipation and a willingness to embark on a project of outmigration. Once they made the voyage, like all immigrants before them, Syrian newcomers were confronted with the challenge of adapting to a different cultural environment. This process of integration often entailed the definition of a new collective identity which would eventually ease the community’s incorporation into the American racial, ethnic, cultural and religious spectrum. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, as notions of gender and national identity were being articulated in Syria, Syrian American women also questioned traditional gender roles within the diaspora, thus becoming active agents in the formation of an early transnational feminist network between the United States and the Arab world. Although the definition of a diasporic identity by the Arab American community has been treated by some scholars, the historiography has generally focused on politics and in particular on the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict (Mc Irvin Abu-Laban; Shain). The incorporation of a feminist agenda into Arab American identity has also been the object of some academic attention (Shakir; Hijab). Yet, the elaboration of a common Arab feminist discourse via different cultural and geographic sites — a phenomenon which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — has remained largely unexplored. Drawing on the seminal studies of Evelyn Shakir and Akram Khater, this article seeks to describe and analyze the emergence of an Arab American feminist movement in the early twentieth century. It also attempts to answer fundamental questions such as: how did Syrian feminists adapt their heritage to the challenging conditions of the New World? How did they face the dual tasks of constructing both their feminism and their Syrian American identity? I will examine the political and cultural context within which connections between the Old and New Worlds were made and review some of the factors that prompted Syrian women to settle in the New World (the United States). I will also focus on the process of economic and social integration of lower-class immigrant women into the host society and discuss the emergence of a feminist consciousness among Syrian American middle-class women and social reformers. Finally, I will analyze how Syrian American feminism reflected the feminist movement in the Middle East at the time of the Arab Renaissance. 32

From the Holy Land to the New World The Emigration of Syrian Women: Features and Factors In the second half of the nineteenth century, Arab migratory flows came mainly from the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Hence, it should be noted that the term “Syrian,” as used in this article, does not refer only to present-day Syria, but also to the part of the Arab world that included, at the time, the current territories of Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. One of the most notable features of this immigration is that women were a significant portion of the total number of arrivals from Syria. Evelyn Shakir’s research has shown, for example, that between 1901 and 1910, women accounted for more than 32% of all registered Syrian immigrants to the United States while at the same time, Italian women only comprised 22% of all Italian immigrants and Greek women hardly 5% of their immigrant group (202). Although legends of cities with “streets paved with gold” circulated widely in the Near East, triggering what some scholars call “the Arabian Gold Rush” (Hanania 9), historians have also argued that economic improvement was not the only incentive. Indeed, the chronic eruption of religious conflict in Ottoman Syria is often cited as a major cause of this migration. In particular, the brutal and deadly civil war of 1860 in Mount Lebanon between the Maronites and the Druze caused thousands of deaths on both sides and led to several population movements. Adele Younis has estimated that nearly three thousand people left the area every year between 1860 and 1899 (133). Entire families — wives, mothers and sisters included — sought to escape this religious turmoil. Some scholars have revealed that contrary to the usual image of the meek and suppressed Arab woman, there were many instances where Syrian women were actually autonomous participants in the migration process, thus challenging the classic assumption that immigrants were typically young trailblazing bachelors. Afif Tannous’s study published in 1942 conveys, for instance, that half the women who left Bechmezzin, his home village, were either single or widows (30). Camilla Gibran, mother of the Syrian American writer Khalil Gibran, who left her debt-ridden husband and immigrated with her two children to America, is a wellknown example of these “unaccompanied women” who traveled without male guardians. Sarah Gualtieri provides further evidence and mentions a study conducted by journalist Louise Houghton who, in 1901, observed: “It is not infrequently the case that the eldest daughter will precede her 33

Dominique Cadinot parents or a sister her brother to this country, and earn the money needed to bring over the father or the brother” (69). Similarly, Arab American writer Vance Bourjaily in his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Spent Youth (1960) relates how his grandmother left her husband and headed to Beirut where she worked to earn passage money to North America. Immigration was sometimes undertaken in self-conscious opposition to rigid marriage laws or in order to escape domestic constraints. A majority of experts, however, agree that the most influential pull factor was the promotion, by American missionaries, of women’s education (Younis; Shakir; Khater). Through their philanthropic and educational work, the wives of missionaries publicized enhanced opportunities for social mobility in the United States and presented new role models for Arab women. Initially, when the American Congregationalist missionaries landed in Beirut in 1820, their objective was to convert the Muslim, Jewish and Catholic communities of the Holy Land to Protestant Christianity. Because they were very much inspired by the millenarian tradition, the missionaries considered the conversion of heretics and infidels as a prerequisite to the future reign of Christ on earth.1 However, as time went by, it became obvious that the great majority of Syrian women were more interested in American secular values, education and professional training, than in the Protestant faith, especially since in Ottoman Syria, female education was virtually non-existent. A minority of Syrian girls received instruction in their homes with a private tutor, which meant that only the wealthiest families could educate their daughters. While French Jesuit missionaries had already established an extensive network of schools, education was primarily conducted in the French language. By contrast, American schools served students of every religion and provided instruction in the vernacular. Above all, for the Protestant missionaries, education was not only geared towards religious indoctrination, but it was also, as noted by Michael B. Oren, the best way to “instill secular notions of patriotism and republicanism” (217). Because they had failed to realize their initial goal, the Americans resolved to become “modern missionaries”2 and promote American civil religion through republican principles and individual liberties. Increasing women’s 1 For a discussion of the impact of millenarism on the mission impulse, see Stookey. 2 Expression used by Oren 287.

34

From the Holy Land to the New World access to education was deemed, as announced by the Reverend Henry Jessup, the most effective way to teach these values: “The mothers of Syria will exert our influence in the homes of the backward nations” (qtd. in Younis 64). Such an announcement made it clear that the Americans’ primary intention was to exploit the traditional role of women as “cultural carriers” whereby, as Anthias and Yuval-Davis have observed, mothers transmit ideology and cultural capital to future generations (315). Consequently, the missionaries arranged and financed the building of free public schools, first in Beirut, then in the surrounding villages. In 1835, Sarah Smith, the wife of Reverend Smith, founded the American School for Girls in Beirut, which was the first school for girls in the Ottoman Empire. In subsequent years, more than thirty schools (for girls and coeducational) opened their doors. By 1900, over eight hundred academic institutions had been founded in the Levant (Jacobs 14). One of the main features of the missionary schools for girls was that, besides home economics, the curriculum also included academic courses and vocational training. Another milestone was reached in 1886 with the founding of the first institution of higher education, the Syrian Protestant College, now known as the American University in Beirut (AUB). Because Americans sought to train the future élite of the Levant, the college provided a liberal arts curriculum that incorporated courses in diverse fields of study such as Arabic literature and Syrian history. At this institution, female students were trained for careers as teachers, engineers and nurses. Initially, the students were predominantly Christian. However, the reputation of the American college soon encouraged the Druze community to send its own contingent of female students. Moreover, as American women became more involved in their missionary and philanthropic activities, the line between the traditional male/female gender spheres became increasingly blurred. In a sense, these women became active agents in the propagation of what Elizabeth E. Prevost has called “missionary feminism” (1). In a study devoted to the Anglican evangelistic practice in Africa, Prevost describes the unforeseen consequences of female involvement and explains that missionary endeavor not only transplanted bourgeois norms of gender and authority, but also challenged and transgressed them. In this case, single and independent Protestant women were sometimes in charge of mission stations and schools in the most remote areas of the Levant. These women became role models for their students, not only because 35

Dominique Cadinot they had the courage to venture abroad but also because they subverted traditional gender roles. Perhaps more significant, however, is the fact that American missionary zeal stimulated a passion for the New World. As Evelyn Shakir explains: “With their textbooks and curriculum, American missionaries helped plant the US in the imagination of thousands of people throughout Syria” (23). It appears that American missions not only promoted a new model of society, but also a reconfiguration of gender roles; this promotion of a more egalitarian society catalyzed immigration by independent women acting on their own initiative. “The Promised Land is not now east and west of the Jordan, but east and west of the Mississippi,” commented Henry Jessup as he regretfully observed the departure of his former students (qtd. in Younis 125). From Economic Independence to Political Participation The largest contingents of Syrian women who immigrated to the US were composed of women from rural areas or under-privileged social classes; educated middle-class females represented a distinct minority of immigrants. Therefore, it is fair to assume that for the majority of female newcomers, adapting to a new economic and socio-cultural environment presented a great challenge. Although at the end of the nineteenth century many immigrants tended to locate in ethnic enclaves within metropolitan areas, the greatest number of Syrians could be found on country roads or hauling their carts on city streets. Pack-peddling was the trade which an overwhelming number of Syrians practiced once they set foot on American soil. For immigrants who did not speak English and could not rely on assistance from a pre-existing economic network, street vending seemed the easiest way to make a living. Despite the patriarchal structure of Near Eastern society, in the United States, Syrian women were heavily involved in this activity, with almost 80% of them employed as rural or urban peddlers (Naff “Arabs,” 56). One explanation for this is that American customers were more willingly to open the doors of their homes to women (Nasr 2). The nature of the goods — clothes, jewelry, hardware — could be another explanation. However, one must also bear in mind that the pioneers of Arab immigration lacked the financial means to start their own business and that the peddling 36

From the Holy Land to the New World trade was a very lucrative activity. Alixa Naff estimates that at the turn of the century, peddling could generate an annual income of $1,000 while the manufacturing sector only produced, on average, $600 a year (“New York,” 7). Women’s labor was essential to the economic adaptation of most immigrant families, a factor which eventually persuaded the men of the community to allow their wives and daughters to leave the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, the participation of women in this business and the resulting degree of freedom they obtained gave rise to complaints from both compatriots and native-born Americans. For Syrian middleclass women who had embraced the cult of domesticity as publicized by American missionaries, the itinerant sellers exceeded their “natural” functions and gender roles. In 1899, one could read in the pages of New York Arabic daily Al-Huda (The Guidance) articles by Syrian journalists, such as Layyat Barakat, who while encouraging her peers to pursue an occupation, warned against the dangers and unworthy character of packpeddling: “It is often dangerous for good, simple-hearted girls who [can become] [...] exposed to evil and whoredom” (qtd. in Shakir 11). Instead, Barakat encourages young Syrian women to take jobs as housemaids because in doing so they can perfect the tasks traditionally assigned to their sex: “She will learn virtue and housekeeping, becoming fit to manage her own home and children in the right manner” (qtd. in Shakir 41). Similarly, Eastern Catholic authorities in the United States sometimes condemned the behavior of female immigrants, as illustrated by this remark made by the priest of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Brooklyn: “It is disgraceful the way Syrian women overstep their boundaries on the pretext that they are living under free skies” (qtd. in Gualtieri 7). In addition to their peers’ disdain, female peddlers were exposed to the racist prejudice of native-born Americans who interpreted women’s peddling as a sign of cultural inferiority and dangerous gender transgression that threatened the “natural” order. Louise Houghton, for example, in her article entitled “Syrians in the United States,” denounced the immorality of itinerant vendors: “They sometimes take their babies with them, but more often leave them behind, to be looked after by their idle husbands. It is not the custom in this country to let the women work and have the men remain idle at home” (qtd. in Shakir 40). While condemning the immigrant women’s “immoral” behavior, the author implicitly impugns the 37

Dominique Cadinot masculinity of their husbands by describing them as “idle” and therefore effeminate, a discourse which besides asserting western superiority also upholds the traditional role of men as primary economic providers for their families. Whether formulated by fellow countrymen or native-born Americans, criticism of female peddling suggests that despite the distance from their homeland, for immigrant Syrian women, sexism continued to be coupled with class and race prejudice. Although they were “living under free skies,” Syrian women from modest origins were expected to adopt and perpetuate the middle-class norm of female dependency. However, if during the early period of Syrian immigration, and despite the controversy, peddling enabled many women to transcend the gender divide, the growth of factory work at the beginning of the twentieth century helped stimulate further changes. As industrialization gained momentum, factory owners often turned to women because they were a cheaper source of labor and supposedly more easily disciplined. The demand for female laborers was such that in 1910, in Fall River, Massachusetts, almost all single women were employed in the cotton mills (Younis 65). An unexpected outcome was that as Syrian women became wageearners, they found new motivations for further involvement in the public sphere. Under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the most influential and radical union in the country, labor militancy changed its approach to unionism and encouraged immigrant employees to become involved in the confrontation between employers and the industrial working class. In 1912, during the famous strike at the American Woolen Company textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Arab women joined their fellow workers to demand wage increases and the abolition of discrimination between native-born Americans and immigrants. For over ten weeks, hundreds of Arab women organized picket lines, raised funds for solidarity and confronted police forces with banners that bore the slogan “We want bread and roses too” – a request for both livable wages and dignity. Considered one of the most important events in the history of industrial unionism, the strike is also known as the first example of successful mobilization by immigrants and women. The efforts in defense of the interests of the laboring classes granted additional legitimacy to the political commitment of Arab women. 38

From the Holy Land to the New World While carrying out evangelistic and educational work, American female missionaries implicitly addressed conventional notions of gender by stepping out of the “woman’s proper sphere.” As a consequence, their female students, Catholic or Muslim, were simultaneously expected to conform to the ideology of domesticity, and encouraged to enter the public and male-dominated sphere. When they immigrated to the United States, many of these former students were rapidly included in the middle-class. Some of them entered the professions or became journalists, like Layyat Barakat. Others, as homemakers, joined the social reform movement that American women had initiated in the wake of the Second Grand Awakening, which eventually grew into Progressivism.3 Inspired by American women involved in the temperance, social purity, and settlement movements, some middle-class Arab women even created their own private charitable organizations. For instance, the Syrian Women’s Union, founded in 1896 in Boston, organized events whose profits were donated to the poorest Arab families. In 1917, the Syrian Ladies’ Aid Society of New York was also founded to “financially, medically and morally” assist those who arrived in the port city. In the same manner, many Anglo American associations, like the famous Denison House in Boston, provided assistance to newly arrived immigrants. Besides providing relief, the managers of these associations also believed that Americanization could alleviate the hardships experienced by immigrants. For that reason, language and job training were offered, and national holidays like Halloween or Thanksgiving were celebrated in order to teach newcomers American customs. Within these associations, new bonds were built and strengthened between Anglo Americans, Syrian Americans, and other immigrants. Syrian American women were also politically active in the suffrage movement, suggesting that the reformers’ ambitions went well beyond the public’s immediate needs. The evil effects of industrialization on the lives of the working class and newly arrived immigrants captured the attention of activist women, with female suffrage becoming the most controversial area of reform. Ever since the famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, American feminists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucrecia Mott, organized an annual conference to demand the right to vote. In order to maintain the 3 The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival movement which began around 1790 and reached its peak in the 1840s. The revivalists became leaders of many social concerns such as education, prison reform, temperance and women’s rights.

39

Dominique Cadinot momentum of their movement, suffragist activists also launched grassroots campaigns targeting immigrant communities. Between 1909 and 1913, the founders of Denison House, Emily Greene Balch and Helena Dudley, both of whom were ardent supporters of female enfranchisement, gave their Arabic protégées the opportunity to join the movement. In demonstrations that were often severely repressed, the militant “Syrian ladies,” as reported in the archives of Denison House, marched alongside their Anglo American counterparts in the streets of Boston: “Today, activists from Lebanon, Tripoli, Damascus and Albania marched proudly through the city” (qtd. in Shakir 60). By the early twentieth century, the wives and daughters of the new Arab bourgeois classes were involved in most sectors of public life; assistance to the poor, education and culture were areas in which they assumed new roles and became models of autonomy. As Evelyn Shakir elucidates: “Women were offered opportunities for leading instead of following” (64). On the surface, at least, it appears that Americanization as promoted by American reformers both enhanced the socialization process and promoted emancipation. Feminist Voices from the Mahjar As previously explained, American missionaries had a significant influence on their students, many of whom subsequently immigrated to the United States in order to pursue an education. The crystallization of feminist aspirations and the definition of a paradigm associating gender and ethnicity was the work of these intellectuals, particularly through the ethnic press and Mahjar literature — the literature of the diaspora. Between 1901 and 1910, the United States accepted a record number of nearly nine million new immigrants. As more people flocked to the cities, the ethnic composition of urban areas became more diverse. Experiencing a sense of dislocation, many immigrants established their own institutions, one of the most customary being the ethnic press. The Syrian American, although comparatively less numerous than the Italians or Irish, were particularly productive in this field. In 1892, the Maronites of New York City founded the first Syrian newspaper, Kawkab America (“The Star of America”). Seven years later, it was the Greek Orthodox community’s turn to create their own daily newspaper. By 1907, there were a total of twenty-one Arabic dailies, weeklies and monthlies in the 40

From the Holy Land to the New World United States (Khater 88). The main function of the ethnic press was to keep readers informed of events back home. However, papers also assisted newcomers in the process of adjustment. The spirit of the Syrian press was rather conservative and the tone largely sectarian, yet Syrian Americans were more interested in embracing their new lives than in preserving their cultural heritage. As Arab American novelist Vance Bourjaily explains, first generation immigrants were “busy being Americans” (238). Xenophobic and nativist agitation was gaining ground in public opinion in the 1920s following the massive influx of new immigrants. Although few in number, Syrians were nonetheless subject to racist attacks and sometimes referred to as “Mediterranean trash” (Younis 78). In the mind of some employers, Syrians were radical agitators, or so reported historian Herman Feldman: “Employers regard Syrians unfavorably because they’re a lot of trouble makers, much too fond of radical labor movements” (qtd. in Younis 89). Hence the time was not right for any exhibition of ethnic pride. This is the conclusion Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban also makes: “In the community, there was an emphasis on low-profile acculturation and adaptation to the dominant patterns” (51). Obviously, the American social situation was not conducive for Syrian American feminism, so inspiration had to be found elsewhere. The development that triggered the emergence of Syrian American feminism arose in the ancestral homeland. During the first decade of the twentieth century, partly as a result of the secular nationalist culture that came out of missionary encounters, the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire were in the grip of a nationalist upsurge.4 Related to the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) that had developed in Egypt a few years earlier, the movement advocated the unity of all Arabs, Christians and Muslims, thus articulating and defending an ecumenical and secular conception of group identity. A level of consciousness was reached in 1905 after the publication of The Awakening of the Arab Nation in which the author, Nagib Azoury, a Syrian-Lebanese Maronite, denounced the mechanisms of oppression exploited by the Ottoman Empire to weaken Arabic-speaking people. For Near Eastern feminists, it seemed the time was ripe for the reevaluation of gender roles. Accordingly, they seized the opportunity to highlight the 4 The role played by American missionary institutions in triggering the Arab Renaissance has been the subject of ongoing debate. See Oren and Ziadat.

41

Dominique Cadinot multiplicity of oppressions and claimed that their cause had to be heard. In their view, the status of women and the nationalist platform were intimately connected. Although feminist issues were, in fact, not a matter of priority for most Nahda leaders, many Arab women realized that they could play a momentous role in the revolt against Ottoman rule. In 1910, a young graduate student from the American University in Beirut, Mary Ajami, founded al-Arus (The Bride), the first journal in the Arab East calling for the emancipation of women. Ajamy was editor-in-chief and employed a group of female reporters on the journal’s editorial board, but, for fear of reprisals, most of them wrote under pseudonyms. The magazine was dedicated “To those who believe that in the spirit of women is the strength to kill the germs of corruption, and that in her hand is the weapon to rend the gloom of oppression and in her mouth the solace to lighten human misery” (qtd. in Khater). The magazine introduced Ajamy to the literary circles of Syria, and she began to attend intellectual salons to discuss philosophy and poetry with male authors at a time when most Arab women were confined to their homes. Throughout the Middle East, other publications for women also appeared such as al-Kitade in Beirut in 1912 and Fatat al-Niyl in Cairo in 1913. However, as expected, most of these magazines concentrated on literary discussions and on the promotion of education among women. In fact, these periodicals followed an earlier trend that had started in Egypt with the publishing of Qasim Amin’s books. In 1899, in Tahrir al-mar’a (The Liberation of Women), Qasim not only pleaded for the education of women, but also for the reform of divorce laws and for the banning of the Islamic veil. More importantly, Qasim developed the idea that the subjection of the Arab people and the cultural paralysis that resulted from it could not be fought without a new definition of gender relations: “When the status of a nation is low, reflecting an uncivilized condition for that nation, the status of women is also low, and when the status of the nation is elevated, reflecting on the progress and civilization of that nation, the status of the women in that country is also elevated” (6). Although Qasim is sometimes referred to as “the original theorist of women’s emancipation in the Muslim world” (Zeidan 15), he maintained his belief in patriarchal domination over women and limited women’s roles to “the educated mother” and “the ideal housewife.” In other words, his conception of female emancipation 42

From the Holy Land to the New World was a reflection of the western cult of true womanhood and the notion of republican motherhood. Inspired and encouraged by the Middle Eastern elite, Syrian American intellectuals, many of whom sought to prevent the complete assimilation of their diasporic, transnational community, began to define a distinct Syrian secular identity in the US. Bringing together the various religious groups and common cultural heritage of the broader community, the Syrian American élite established the first “Syrian Society” in 1892 to promote unity and the preservation of their heritage (Naff “New York”, 10). As the movement became more popular, the ethnic press opened its columns to nationalists as well as feminist intellectuals. Faced with the seemingly unavoidable assimilation of Syrians in response to nativist pressure, these intellectuals struggled for the emancipation of women as much as they sought to elaborate a new collective identity. An outstanding figure in the Mahjar press was the novelist and journalist Afifa Karam. After marrying at the age of fourteen, she settled with her husband in the United States in 1897 and was offered a position as “Director of Women’s Issues” at New York’s leading Syrian daily, AlHuda, which gave her the opportunity to write, under her real name, a regular column for Syrian American women. Once she had gained some editorial experience, Karam established a magazine of her own, The Syrian Woman (renamed The New World for Women in 1913) whose ambition was to offer a critical perspective on the status of Arab women in general: “My main intention here is to show the status of most Oriental women and the way they are treated. Oriental women are the most unfortunate creatures. They are the least knowledgeable and the last to be informed of their Godgiven rights which men have wrongfully usurped” (qtd. in Khater). Besides portraits of famous women, there were also articles on the need to educate girls. As Karam questioned: “Is education vile or virtuous? The answer, no doubt, is virtuous. So what sin have women committed to be deprived of it? And for what reason? And according to what law?” (qtd. in Shakir 56). Similarly, Karam rebelled against the tradition of arranged marriage which she considered not a family affair, but an infringement on women’s freedom. Eventually, Karam’s reputation reached the Middle East where her views were met with an immediate echo from Arab women readers. In 43

Dominique Cadinot the Egyptian newspaper for women al-Mara al Jadida, in a section called “Hadith al-Mahjar” (“Words from the Diaspora”), Karam regularly described the achievements and challenges of Syrian American women. In doing so, Karam’s objective was clearly to establish a transnational feminist dialogue between those who had made the passage to America and those who remained in their ancestral homeland. Taking advantage of the freedom offered by immigration, Karam encouraged her female compatriots in the East to build on the progress made by Syrian American women. Afifa Karam formulated a vigorous transnational feminist critique of Old World practices that catered to both the exiled community and activists in Syria and Egypt. However, not all Arab female intellectuals were willing to relinquish the domestic ideology with which they had been inculcated. In 1893, the journalist and former teacher at the American School for Girls in Tripoli, Hanna Kasbani Kourani, for example, gave a rather conservative speech while participating in the International Women’s Meeting in Boston, which illustrated some middle-class Arab women’s desire to maintain traditional gender roles: “The domestic plan is natural for women and they must not overstep it” (qtd. in Khater). Nationalist male thinkers in the Arab world had set for women “neat” and “comfortable” boundaries that sheltered women and were not easily transgressed. However, after several years of lecturing and participating in conventions throughout the US, Hanna Kourani eventually cast away the traditional restraints she had internalized and adopted a more radical position. On a trip to Lebanon in 1901, she developed a new discourse which reflected the influence of Syrian American feminists: “Our knowledge of the greatness that women in the West have accomplished and are accomplishing should exhort us to follow suit here in the East” (qtd. in Khater). The struggle for the liberation of Syrian women in the United States was also shaped by men who deployed the diasporic condition to engage in a more comprehensive critique of Middle Eastern society. In 1908, the Syrian American writer and poet Khalil Gibran published a book entitled al-Arwah al-Mutamarrida (Spirits Rebellious) in which he addressed some of the injustices suffered by women. Composed of four tragic love stories, the book critiques the status of the Arab woman and her position in Syrian society. In the first story (“Madame Rose Hanie”), Gibran portrays a young girl who, having been married against her will, fled the family home to live 44

From the Holy Land to the New World with the man she loves. Through this portrait, Gibran conveys the voice of Arab women under the yoke of tradition: “Now I am pure and clean because the law of Love has freed me and made me honorable and faithful. I ceased selling my body for shelter and my days for clothes” (16). Gibran’s criticism also targets the patriarchal interpretation of sacred texts, and he even argues that the subordination of women is contrary to God’s will: “I have obeyed the will of God in everything I have done and followed the call of my heart while listening to the angelic voice of heaven” (22). The penalty for such audacity came quickly: in Syria, the book was severely criticized by the Maronite Church which claimed it was an unacceptable attack on the clergy and an incitement to the moral degradation of women. Eventually, the book was considered heretical, and Gibran was excommunicated in absentia by the Maronite Patriarch — an event that illustrated the price that some diasporic Syrian American paid for their feminist activism. At the turn of the twentieth century, Arab feminists in the Levant and the United States joined with nationalists to forge a distinctive Syrian identity. However, the confrontation with different socio-cultural patterns in the United States inevitably caused a questioning of the traditions observed in the homeland. Syrian women, whether street peddlers or industrial workers, gained economic independence from their husbands and became more active in the political realm. By participating in the reform movements of their host society, middle-class Syrian women were able to redefine their place and responsibilities within their community. As they joined the Progressive movement, many committed themselves to feminism and became vocal advocates of women’s suffrage. In the first decades of the twentieth century, nationalist struggle in Syria offered local women a platform from which to challenge patriarchal gender roles. Supported and inspired by their counterparts in Egypt and Syria, Syrian American activists fed their nationalist aspirations with new ideas concerning the status of women in their host society. As illustrated in this article, the feminist solidarity that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century was clearly enriched by the contributions of Syrian activists who were already working in a transnational space. Far from the clichés that render Arab women either belly dancers or silent statues, the women of this Arab community were, in the period before the First World War, at the forefront of social and community development. Even though their positions were varied and changing, they still exemplify the idea that 45

Dominique Cadinot diaspora can inspire both a new definition of collective identity and a reconfiguration of gender relations. Works Cited Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. “Women and the Nation-State.” Nationalism. Eds. John Hutchison and Anthony D. Smith. 312–16. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. Bourjaily, Vance. Confessions of a Spent Youth. New York: Dial, 1960. Print. Gibran, Khalil. Spirits Rebellious. 1908. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2007. Print. Gualtieri, Sarah. “Gendering the Chain Migration Thesis: Women and Syrian Transatlantic Migration, 1878–1924.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24.1 (2004): 69–81. Print. Hanania, Ray. Arabs of Chicagoland. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2005. Print. Hijab, Nadia. “Islam, Social Change, and the Reality of Arab Women’s Lives.” Islam, Gender And Social Change. Eds. Yvonne Yazbek Haddad and John L. Esposito. 40–54. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Hitti, Philip Khuri. The Syrians in America. 1924. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005. Print. Jacobs, Matthew F. Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 2011. Print. Khater, Akram F. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920. Berkeley: U. of California P. E-Books Collection, 2001. Web. 14 Jun. 2013. McIrvin Abu-Laban, Sharon. “The Coexistence of Cohorts: Identity and Adaptation among Arab American Muslims.” Arab Americans: Continuity and Change. Eds. Baha Abu-Laban and Michael W. Suleiman. 45–64. Belmont, MA: AAUG, 1989. Print.

46

From the Holy Land to the New World Naff, Alixa. “Arabs.” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Ed. Stephan Therstorm. 126-29. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. Print. -----. “New York: The Mother Colony.” A Community of Many Worlds: ArabAmericans in New York City. Eds. Kathleen Benson and Philip M. Kayal. 3–10. Syracuse: Museum of the City of New York/Syracuse UP, 2002. Print. Nasr, Najwa. “Early Lebanese Immigrant Women to the USA.” ArNetAmerican Resources on the Net. Liverpool: John Moores U. Web. 24 Jun. 2013. Oren, Michael B. Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. Print. Prevost, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Missionary Feminism.” Oxford UP. Web. 24 Jun. 2013. Qasim, Amin. The Liberation of Women. 1899. Cairo: American U. in Cairo Press, 2000. Print. Shain, Yossi. Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the US and their Homelands. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Shakir, Evelyn. Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1997. Print. Stookey, Robert W. “The Holy Land: the American Experience.” Middle East Journal 30 (1976): 351–68. Print. Watson, Bruce. Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream. New York: Viking Publishers, 2005. Print. Younis, Adele L. The Coming of the Arabic-Speaking People to the United States. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1995. Print. Zeidan, Joseph. Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond. Albany: State U. of New York P., 1995. Print. Ziadat, Adel A. Western Science in the Arab World: The Impact of Darwinism 1860–1930. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Print.

47

.

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 49-64

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf Katherine Lashley Books by and about Muslim Americans are becoming more widely read. One such book is The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, A Novel (2006) by Mohja Kahf. Novels like The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf tend to deal with significant issues for Muslim American women such as education, family obligations, marriage, the body and sexuality, and independence. Although these novels are becoming more popular, they have not garnered much attention. Moreover, these books must be analyzed in feminist and postcolonial ways in order to understand fully the importance and meaning of their characters, situations, and how they reflect the lives of some Muslim American women. This article will focus on the imperialist overtones of double consciousness and “unhomeliness” in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and will analyze how the main character, Khadra, challenges imperialism and presents a different view of colonialism than perhaps expected and previously conveyed in older articles and books. Khadra manages to challenge imperialism by coming to terms with her double consciousness and her own unique, hybrid, identity. By deciding for herself how much of each culture to adapt, Khadra also exhibits a transnational feminist stance concerning her body, sexuality, education, and life. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf is essentially a bildungsroman that follows the story of Khadra, an American Muslim, from her childhood through her twenties. As she matures, she shares her experiences regarding the veil, assuming religious duties such as fasting during Ramadan, going on the Hajj, and interacting with American culture in the public school and university setting. Khadra follows through with the lifestyle expected from some Muslim women by marrying young. Then her life changes: she gets an abortion, divorces her husband, recovers from a mental breakdown in Syria, and moves to Philadelphia to study photography. While learning photography, Khadra also learns more about her religion and other

Katherine Lashley religions, eventually arriving at a more comprehensive understanding of herself as a woman, a Muslim, and a Muslim American, which leaves her, at the end of the novel, with more potential to grow in her faith, individuality, and relationships. As a woman, Khadra, can also be seen through a postcolonialist lens as the colonized subject. In this case, the theory of double consciousness can help elucidate Khadra’s character by explaining her reactions to her ethnic culture, religion, family, and American culture. The idea of double consciousness was first presented by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. In this work, DuBois explained that as a black man in predominantly white America, he felt that he had two different identities and cultures shaping him: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (9). DuBois’s description of double consciousness for African Americans can also be applied to Khadra and to how she navigates the different events in her life as a Muslim, American, and woman. Not only does Khadra experience a similar twoness as a Muslim American, but she also senses a “thirdness” that is a result of her womanhood. Specifically, she is a woman who experiences “femaleness” and sexuality in ways that are complicated by the seemingly warring cultural practices of Islam and American secularism. The meaning of womanhood for Khadra is determined by how she blends her two cultures. Khadra, in addition to experiencing double consciousness, also undergoes “unhomeliness” as delineated by Homi K. Bhabha: The negating activity is, indeed, the intervention of the “beyond” that establishes a boundary: a bridge, where “presencing” begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world—the unhomeliness — that is the condition of extraterritorial and cross-cultural initiations. To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the “unhomely” be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. (Bhabha 13) 50

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf Khadra experiences unhomeliness and double consciousness when she travels to Mecca and Syria. Khadra recognizes the two very different cultures of Americans and Muslims as both of her cultures and the three main locations that shape her life — America, Mecca, and Syria — as her homes, yet she struggles to feel comfortable within her two cultures and their physical spaces. As she attempts to resolve her double consciousness, she experiments with adjusting and adapting her cultural practices to the specific physical place in which she resides. Applying the theories of double consciousness and unhomeliness to Khadra allows the reader to understand why Khadra acts in sometimes contradictory ways and why she sometimes seizes opportunities, yet, at other times, remains passive. The “twoness” and “threeness” — or multiple consciousnesses — that struggle within her make discovering her identity and “perfect mix of culture” a personal feat that she must overcome throughout her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. This struggle also affects how she sees herself as a woman, and what kind of feminist action she eventually takes. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes in her article, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” feminists from the United States and other western countries apply their own stereotypes of “third world women” onto women from other cultures. However, western feminists need to acknowledge that women from developing countries experience different social, economic, political, and religious influences. Therefore, cultural sensitivity needs to be exercised when formulating transnational feminist solutions since western values cannot, and should not, be forced upon individuals operating in such dramatically different spheres. Likewise, Khadra must be considered in light of Mohanty’s observations regarding women from nonwestern cultures. When one examines Khadra’s familial life, social life, economic background, and religion, it becomes clear that Khadra must create a feminism of her own that incorporates her specific cultural contexts. As a woman who does not neatly fit into one particular group, her actions and thoughts about her “female self” must be analyzed with a vision of feminism that takes into consideration her unique situation. Khadra, whose name, in Arabic, evokes images of lush green foliage akin to that found in the Garden of Eden, flourishes into a feminist on her own terms, just as she creates her own hybrid culture for herself. 51

Katherine Lashley Certainly, Khadra suffers from unhomeliness or a displaced cultural identity because she was born in Syria and moved to Indiana as a young child, growing up in the United States. As a Syrian who has been told by her parents that they would soon move back to Syria, she — along with her family — tried to maintain their culture at the expense of American culture. During her childhood and early teen years, Khadra appears to have done a competent job separating herself from American culture by not having “American” friends. It is not until she and her family go on the Hajj to Mecca that she realizes the intensity of her two cultures — Muslim and American — as they become evident in her thinking and actions. Thus, her experience in Mecca encourages her to confront these two cultures and what they mean to her, and Khadra’s experiences in this context attest that she, like other immigrants, will always struggle with her cultural identity. As a woman who identifies with both Muslim and American culture, Khadra is a construct of both of these cultures. “By asking and answering the third question [To what country or countries or to what culture(s) am I forever linked?], [Khadra] confronts the fact that…she is both an individual and a social construct created and shaped primarily by the dominant culture” (Bressler 242). She knows her dominant culture is Muslim and as she matures, she increasingly begins to make decisions for herself that are informed and guided by this culture. For instance, Khadra begins wearing the veil at a young age because her parents and culture dictate that girls must veil. Along with veiling, however, comes physical limitations that Khadra begins to question such as swimming in the community pool and riding a bicycle. Nevertheless, when Khadra grows older she consciously “redecides” to veil. On one occasion in Syria, a slight breeze blows her veil to her shoulders, baring her face, hair, and neck. She revels in the feeling of the sun on her skin and hair, interpreting this as a gift from Allah and something to cherish. Yet Khadra repositions her veil, wearing it as she has always done, recognizing that it is actually a part of her. While it is arguable that Khadra has, in this case, internalized her oppression to the extent that she is now embracing it, feeling “naked” without the veil, as Samaa Abdurraquib recognizes, the veil can become “the visual repository for the Muslim identity that is being preserved, and veiling shifts from being construed as somewhat normal behavior into an action that proclaims identity and (sometimes) allegiances” (59). Thus, it is just as possible that 52

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf Khadra transforms her veil from an item that has meaning within her family and community to a personal practice and decision, recognizing that it visually proclaims her identity. One morning when Khadra is in Mecca, she hears beautiful music coming from a mosque. She dresses and leaves the house with the intention of worshipping at the mosque. However, guards restrict her from entering the mosque, asserting that only men are allowed to worship there; women must worship at home. At home in America, she and the other women worship in the same room with the men. Moreover, mosques usually “have separate entrances for women. Where women sit during the prayer is related to tradition, the inclination of the imam or other mosque leaders, and the mosque facility itself” (Smith 135), and in many cases, women are even given their own prayer facilities. Yet here, in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, Khadra is not allowed inside the mosque. The distinctions — “in America” and “in Mecca” — thus underscore the differences between the two cultures as she experiences them. It becomes apparent to her that even the construct of Muslim culture has changed in America: it has become more American, more western, more equal. She has benefitted from worshipping in the same room with other women and men, hearing their prayers, which has added her religious efforts, but in Mecca, this is denied. Khadra suddenly recognizes that she prefers worshipping with men. For her, the Hajj morphs from a spiritual journey into a cultural journey: she has visited the true homeland for Muslims, and she has found that she is an unwanted stranger. Indiana and Mecca have different ways of observing the Islamic faith, and she notices that she cannot force her own version and experience of Islam onto the kind of Islam practiced in Mecca — nor does she desire the enforcement of the type of Islam practiced in Mecca onto her. Another experience in Mecca that challenges Khadra’s cultural perceptions is the joy ride with her cousin and his friends. They drive to an isolated place and commence flirting and making out, and one boy forces himself on her: “Without warning, he was pulling her veil down the back of her head and pushing his other hand up against her breasts and his mouth was grazing her now exposed neck. She was squeezed up against the car door, and then he was pushing himself on top of her, his jeaned thighs taut” (Kahf 177). Khadra has been raised on the assumption that good Muslim girls do not flirt, kiss, or even date. Yet here she is in Mecca, surrounded by Muslim teenagers who do not adhere to these fundamental 53

Katherine Lashley Islamic values. The hypocrisy of the experience also exposes yet another complicated layer of the immigrant experience — the often shocking realization that the homeland has not remained frozen or static. In many cases, values associated with the homeland sometimes cease to exist years, and even decades, before they are abandoned by diasporic communities. The collapse of the idea of being “respectable and modest” affects Khadra deeply, as does the assumption that she is American and therefore immoral and sexually permissive. In an attempt to set the record straight, Khadra yells, in Arabic, “I’m not American!” (Kahf 178). In fact, she has spent most of her life persuading herself and her family that she is not American. Her parents have told her repeatedly that they are living in America only temporarily and that soon they will be back in Syria, safe in a Muslim culture and away from the decadence of American culture. Thus Khadra especially resents being labeled as an American because in her mind, she is not American and she has invested so much of her time and energy fighting this category. She embraces the fact that she does not adhere to certain American customs, such as dating and premarital romantic relationships. She understands that there are American girls who are moral, but she encounters the problem of communicating this to Muslims from other cultures who may have internalized negative stereotypes concerning American women (in much the same way that Americans have internalized stereotypes about Muslim women). What exacerbates this problem for Khadra is the fact that in neither culture is she safe when it comes to romantic relationships. As an American, she is seen as sexually active by her cousin who tells her: “‘What is it — what is the big deal — we’re not doing anything you have to worry about,’ Ghazi said thickly. ‘— we’ve got our clothes on — and you grew up in America — don’t tell me you never do stuff like this in America—’” (Khaf 177–178). However, because her cousin and his friends are “immoral” and hypocritical, they assume that she, too, is like them: “‘Ohhh […] Syria, huh,’ he grinned. ‘Syrian girls have a reputation’” (Khaf 176). Here, Khadra is not only dealing with the knowledge that she must learn to operate in two different cultures, but she is also simultaneously revising her perception of these cultures. In this instance, the perception of her two cultures is at odds with who she really is, increasing her sense of alienation and unhomeliness — specifically the feeling of not fitting in with either group. 54

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf Throughout the novel Khadra operates in this liminal middle space between cultures, which is why Transnational Feminism — a type of feminism that transcends boundaries and labels — is able to provide her with the philosophical foundation to cope with her world. Khadra realizes through the two experiences in Mecca — the mosque and the joy ride — that her thinking has been profoundly shaped by the local Muslim culture that exists in her small town. Her modesty does not make her jealous of her cousins, and Khadra in no way believes that she has been cheated out of sexual experiences. She embraces and appreciates the local culture that has adopted, which becomes a source of strength as her life becomes increasingly complicated and she embarks on global adventures. Khadra’s alienation returns when she is newly married. Throughout her childhood and teenage years, her parents and community allowed her the freedom to ride her bike, participate in student organizations on campus, work, and pursue an education. These liberties do not disappear with marriage, but one by one her husband reveals the fact that he does not want his wife to be engaging with the public sphere because “He hadn’t expected her to be doing things that would embarrass him” (Kahf 227). Asma Gull Hasan, in writing about Muslim culture, recognizes that some men will limit women’s rights by forcing them to wear the hijab, confining them to the house, and not allowing them to mix with the opposite sex, all with the end goal of exerting patriarchal power over women. Khadra’s husband, Juma, fits Hasan’s description of such Muslim men. Though Khadra does not elaborate on the sexual implications of bike riding, one can read her husband’s discomfort as a sign that he dislikes the idea of his wife riding with the bicycle seat between her legs. Juma pleads with her: “‘Please don’t do it. Don’t do it,’ he begged. Plus, he leaned in and whispered that he’d make it worth her while to stay home. She felt a tingling where the bicycle seat pressed between her legs. They stayed in all afternoon and didn’t even miss the milk and groceries that earlier had seemed so urgently needed” (Kah 228). The sexual dimension of cycling is implied when he manages to convince her to abandon her pastime by substituting it with actual sex. However, after this encounter Khadra informs him that he will not be able to prevent her from bike riding since there is also a practical aspect to it: it is a form of transportation that allows her to acquire household needs, such as groceries. Juma responds through another power exercise: he tells her that he does not want her to participate 55

Katherine Lashley in the Muslim student organization at her university, even though she is one of the leaders of the group. Once again, Khadra’s two cultures clash: she enjoys the freedom of being an American woman but is limited by her husband’s definition of Muslim culture which is different than hers, partly because he grew up in a different city in the United States. Negotiating between her two cultures eventually leads to a breakdown: “And finally one day she was done. Exhausted. As if she’d traveled down the seven gates of hell, discarding at every door some breastplate or amulet that used to shore her up. She felt empty. Crumpled and empty, that was her. Like a jilbab [headscarf] you’ve taken off your body and hung on a nail” (Kahf 264–265). Like other colonized and displaced women, Khadra not only confronts her cultural heritage, but also the added fact that she is a woman. Being a female refugee and Muslim in America affects her thoughts and actions so dramatically that she can no longer deal with her multiple crises as a Muslim, a woman, an American, and a young diasporic immigrant. Hasan observes that “American Muslim women are really between two worlds: the old world of traditions, preserved and passed down by immigrant parents or older members of the indigenous community, and the new world, as presented to us by the feminist movement, American emphasis on gender equality, and the Qur’an, in a sense, too” (111). Khadra most definitely is caught between these two worlds of tradition and progress. Although her husband is a member of her generation, he, like her parents and others in her Muslim community, represents the old world with its traditions and customs. Khadra may have been trying to convince herself that she is not American, but ideas of progress and women’s advancement influence her life decisions. Khadra recognizes that if she and Juma were raised in the same Muslim American community, then she probably would not have had any problems with her arranged marriage. However, she comes from a different Muslim American community, and embraces the diversity of Muslims in America while resisting the dominant tendency to conflate all Muslims into one indiscernible group. Her community and parents are comparably liberal, even to the point of encouraging her, and Khadra must reconcile herself to the kind of woman she will be, which affects her marriage to Juma. After Juma attempts to exert more control over her actions, Khadra reacts by obtaining an abortion and a divorce, which ends with her 56

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf emotional breakdown, mainly because of the “shame” which she has now brought to her family. As Susan Muaddi Darraj conveys, “the fathers of many Arab American women emphasize the fact that the behavior of an Arab woman reflect[s] upon the family as a whole” (253). Khadra is caught between fulfilling her desires and choosing her own path in life, especially when she knows that any action she takes, whether it is good or bad, will reflect upon her family, and that her family, to a certain extent, will be judged by her actions. With such a breakdown in identity, there is nothing left for Khadra to do but try to mend her life on her own terms. As a divorced woman who has had an abortion, Khadra cannot reach out to her Muslim community. Moreover, as a Muslim, she will not allow herself to become entirely Americanized by asking help from non-Muslims. While a hybridity of cultures has served Khadra well so far, the divorce serves as a turning point in her life and she temporarily returns to the shelter of her cultural roots, Syria. Surrounded by Syrian and Muslim culture, Khadra finds asylum from her struggle. By returning to her home country and culture, she returns to a place where she can heal herself, the space where her cultural consciousness began. “Back where she came from: Syria. Land where her fathers died. Land that made a little boomerang scar on her knee” (Kahf 266). Khadra appears alone, without announcement, at her aunt’s house, and her aunt takes her in and nurses her back to mental, spiritual, and cultural health. Thinking and participating in only one culture helps Khadra focus on herself and mitigate her cultural consciousness. She does not have to be self-conscious about cultural practices, specifically what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. “Somehow all the unfamiliarity seemed familiar to Khadra” (Kahf 268). By re-centering on herself, she begins her healing process. Khadra resists colonial discourse as she does not bring from the United States an imperialist attitude toward the people of Syria. She lets Syrian culture surround her, which is contrary to the American/imperialist attitude of forcing western values onto other countries. As someone who knows what it feels like to be judged, Khadra refrains from criticizing Syrians, which enables her to leave Syria refreshed and whole. By allowing Syria to speak to her, Khadra learns that she is not the person everyone thought her to be, herself included. Prior to her 57

Katherine Lashley breakdown, she majors in science in college, but afterward when she moves to Philadelphia, she changes to photography — a hobby she began in Syria. Photography may not be as acceptable as science to her parents, but it is what she wants to do. Through professional photography, she gains an empowered voice and is in control: when she takes pictures for herself, she decides what to photograph and what to ignore. She becomes interested in photographing other Muslim women in America, which not only adds to the symbolic significance of what she is doing by breaking her own silence, but also provides a physical space to depict the hidden stories of Muslim women. As a woman, she is allowed access to places where men are forbidden. She photographs Muslim women as they prepare for weddings and celebrate birthdays, and Khadra’s newly acquired knowledge of photography — including her expert hand for holding the camera and expert eye for catching great shots — gives a voice to these women. Implicitly, Khadra’s photographs significantly influence how the bodies of Muslim women are perceived. Even if women are the only viewers of the photographs, Muslim women’s bodies become more of a visual object in pictures. The typically photographed female — the western fashion model — is in stark contrast to the image of many Muslim American women, mostly because of the practice of veiling. The veil, or headscarf, and the burqa — a piece of fabric, no matter how large or small, thin or thick — acts as a barrier between the woman being seen as an individual. Women wearing veils and burqas are usually portrayed as victims of Muslim fundamentalism and are seen as powerless, even when many of them are not (Haddad 31). Khadra’s photographs thus go “behind the veil” into the private spaces of women, and in the process, reveals their personalities and lives, showing that they are not victims of Muslim fundamentalism. By taking the pictures, she also demonstrates that she is not a victim either because she chooses what to photograph and is able to capture moments that a male photographer would never be able to capture. As a photographer, Khadra also attains a transnational feminist reach: she is in control because she holds the lens that can capture any image she desires, which she can then share with the rest of the world. This power is conveyed through an assignment Khadra is given by her magazine editor who tells her to go home and take pictures of her Muslim American community. This assignment frames the narrative of Khadra’s story, which opens with her returning home and taking pictures. Her memories then 58

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf take over, providing the reader with a narrative of her background and experiences. The end of her story is the assignment itself, for which she takes pictures of her home, community, and the people she knows. She sees her Muslim American community through a photographer’s lens and through her own lens, which she shares with the magazine editor, who will ensure that the images captured will be distributed among the masses, particularly Americans who know little about the Muslim American community, and beyond. This becomes a source of agency for Khadra because as one person, she is now able to exert authority over how Americans will see her neighbors, culture, and religion. This is a direct result of her coming to terms with her identity, with deciding who she really is as a cultural and social construct. She recognizes that her community likewise needs to come to terms with its own identity, and she serves as a powerful vehicle for this process. She seeks to represent accurately her people and its practices, conveying that the way in which they conceive of family and worship is just as legitimate as any other community in America, or around the world. Khadra also intensifies the voice and perspective of the Muslim woman’s body by revealing her thoughts about her own body throughout the text. Khadra takes the reader — even the male reader — behind the veil to reveal how much Muslim women share with other women, thus establishing a transnational sisterhood of sorts. Khadra’s candidness simultaneously serves as a means of negotiating two facets of her identity struggle: the Muslim interpretation of “decency” versus the American proclivity towards revealing the private aspects of one’s life. Khadra discusses her period, abortion, sex, cutting her pubic hair with scissors and inadvertently cutting herself, and wearing the veil. Blood serves as a reoccurring, even “cleansing,” motif in the text: almost like a sacrificial lamb, Khadra bleeds in the bathroom during the pubic hair incident, and once again when she describes her abortion. “Khadra had some cramping and bleeding like a heavy period. Not really any more than she usually got. Some lower-back pain the day after she lugged around a chem textbook, her Trapper Keeper, and The Arab-Israeli Dilemma in her backpack” (Kahf 250). Khadra even glorifies the power that her period gives her over religious rites during Ramadan (menstruating women are forbidden from fasting). While her mother and brother fast, she prepares a large sandwich and eats in front of them, which, for fasting Muslims, is actually sacrilegious on two levels: women are supposed to be ashamed of the fact that their period is 59

Katherine Lashley preventing them from fasting, and it is considered to be disrespectful to eat in front of fasting individuals. Khadra thus challenges both directives: “The big bonus from getting her period, of course, was that Khadra got to break her fast. She pulled her fist toward her in triumph: Yessss! She made a triple-decker beef salami sandwich on sesame-seed bread with tomato, lettuce, mushrooms, mayo, ketchup of course, and beet pickles. ‘Periods rock,’ she mumbled with her mouth full” (Kahf 109). By eating publically, she openly proclaims that she is not ashamed of the fact that she is menstruating and shares this relatively personal information with her mother and brother. Khadra even takes the reader into her bedroom after she and her husband have had sex. “It took her twice the work to get where he got with half the effort. It got easier as they got more experience together. ‘I had no idea it was that much work,’ Juma said, his hand cupped over her crotch afterward, as she lay breathing hard, her whole heart pounding under his hand” (Kahf 222). She adds more of her female body to the text by describing where her husband touches her, and explaining the role her sexuality plays in the negotiation of her identity. For Khadra, decisions pertaining to her sexuality are surprisingly easy to make given the privacy and mystery that usually enshroud these aspects of a Muslim woman’s life. Ironically, it is the more outwardly visible and public parts of her life — her clothing, education, and marriage — that take more time and effort. Unlike a woman who accepts unquestioningly the teachings of Islam, Khadra exerts her human rights, specifically her right to understand her religion. Kahf says in an interview that “the foremost factor in bringing me to my voice was religion, and the religion of Islam as manifested in my family which had a modern, political Islamist orientation” (qtd. in Davis 383). Khadra reflects the author’s personal experiences through her relationship with Islam. She is encouraged by her family to study religion by learning Arabic and reading the Qur’an. Accordingly, part of Khadra’s voice comes from learning Arabic and reading commentaries on the Qur’an. Khadra joins a women’s study group where she can discuss Arabic, the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the commentaries. By studying the Qur’an, Khadra takes her religious education into her own hands, directing it for herself, and “reading back” from the margins (Zine). This action is particularly significant for Muslim women, 60

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf for female scholars have noted numerous areas in which male writers have misinterpreted the Qur’an. Moreover, such gynocentric groups are important in producing feminist readings of the Qur’an. Irshad Manji, a reformist Muslim who advocates moral courage, says that Islam has become irrelevant for many people because not all of the Qur’an is “Godauthored.” However, it is still uncertain how these feminist readings will be accepted or rejected by the Islamic community, and in many circles such interpretation is considered sacrilegious and inflammatory (Smith 154). Hasan notes: “The debates over the status of women in Islam is probably the best example of how culture affects interpretation. Men like my grandfather have taken a few Qur’anic passages and, coupled with a patriarchal culture, have interpreted them in the most literal and self-serving way” (108–109). Some topics that have been impacted by misinterpretation, which has turned rule into law in many Muslim subcultures, include the wearing of the veil, the immorality of abortion, and the separation of worship spaces for women. Indeed, the Prophet Mohammed’s wife Khadija was the first Muslim woman, and “American Muslim women often invoke the ‘mothers of the faithful,’ as Muhammad’s wives have been referred to, as models for their own behavior and professional involvement” (Smith 130). Khadra does the same, recognizing how the Qur’an speaks about the Prophet Mohammed’s wives and other women. Through her studies, Khadra discovers that according to Islam, the breath of life is not instilled in an unborn child until the fourth month. This leads her to the conclusion that abortion is acceptable for the first 120 days of pregnancy. “Yeah, well, Islamic law allows abortion up to four months [….] All the schools of thought allow it. The only thing they differ on is how long it’s allowed. Four weeks to four months. That’s the range” (Kahf 225). Khadra’s statements convey the feminist understanding that without the persistent and dramatic push of women’s rights in Islam, women will not gain, but lose, their freedom and equality. Their liberties will continue to be limited due to the writings of deceased male scholars who have misinterpreted or misapplied the Qur’an, inserting their own beliefs concerning gender and sexuality — all of which reinforce patriarchal male domination — instead of actually following the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. As Khadra — and even her parents to a lesser extent — educate themselves and reevaluate the teachings of the Qur’an, other areas of 61

Katherine Lashley Khadra’s life begin to change as well, specifically education, marriage, and divorce. Since the Prophet Mohammed’s wife Khadija was an educated woman, both Khadra and her parents conclude that all women should be educated. Moreover, Muslims hold educating women in high regard because in the Qur’an Allah says that it is of great importance to learn and to recite. Some believe that God will ask women on the Day of Judgment if they took advantage of all the knowledge available to them. Others believe that women need to educate themselves if they want to gain advantages in the Muslim community. They also need to be intelligent in order to help run the household and the community (Smith 132). Khadra’s parents, particularly her father, encourage her to apply to numerous colleges and consider various majors. However, even though she chooses a major that initially interests her — science — even this field of education represents a suffocating and patriarchal mechanism of cultural control: according to her parents, a science-based field is more prestigious than the field Khadra ultimately chooses for herself, photography. In science, she cannot convey her personality, but through photography, she can capture part of herself in her photographs, even when taking pictures of objects or strangers. Khadra challenges another mechanism of male dominance, marriage, which replaces one patriarchal figure (her father) with another (her husband) and ensures future patriarchal generations (her sons). Khadra marries young, supposedly securing her place in the Muslim social community (which expects her to marry), since now has a husband to answer for her. However, without having experienced the secular or American experience of dating, Khadra is unaware of the relationship dynamics between couples: she does not understand that one or both people in a relationship can change their way of interacting with the other, and that letting down inner barriers to reveal their true feelings about certain issues is normal. Cultural and religious dictates inform her that she must endure everything in marriage, but it is her aunt who warns her about its traps: “Marriage is a legal arrangement in Islam, not a sacrament as in the Christian sense, and is secured with written contract” (Smith 142). A progressive Muslim, Khadra’s aunt gives her money to hide from her husband just in case she needs it in the future: “Three fat gold coins lay in her [aunt’s] palm. Fat gold coins with mysterious writing, the alphabet neither Arabic nor Latin, nothing Khadra recognized. ‘Osmanli liras’ [Ottoman 62

Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf liras], Téta [aunt] said. ‘This is called security, my dear, and we never show it to our husbands. A woman must keep something for herself, in case of circumstances’” (Kahf 209). Her cultural model tells Khadra that keeping secrets, especially her own stash of money, from her husband is sinful, but, as this incident illustrates, the private information that women give each other subversively challenges such patriarchal dictates. Fortunately, she has enough sense to listen to her aunt. This money supports her after the divorce and during her breakdown, paying for her plane ticket to Syria. Through her trying marriage and divorce, Khadra realizes that her cultural view of marriage and its meaning will not work for an educated woman. Islamic definitions of marriage can sometimes clash with a feminist point of view that advocates freedom and equality for both partners, including the right for a wife to abort the couple’s child. All of Khadra’s actions point to the complex identity of a Muslim American woman who comes to terms with not only her cultural identity, but also her voice as a woman as determined by Islam. Indeed, in the beginning, she reflects a woman who is lost and unsure of what to do with her life and religion. However, as she shares her story, Khadra begins to understand herself and find her own empowered voice. Ultimately, the events in Khadra’s life force her to face her double, or even multiple, consciousness and unhomeliness. She decides how much of each culture she will combine and make her own. She also discovers how her cultural combination will affect her identity as a woman, including her sexuality and legal and political rights. By facing her oppression on numerous levels, Khadra also gains agency for herself and other Muslim women. Khadra creates a place for herself in the world and learns how to use her voice and skills in order to accurately represent herself and her identity, and the tangerine scarf, with its vibrant color, symbolizes Khadra’s acceptance of this hybridity. Through wearing the tangerine scarf — a scarf that she buys when she is in Syria as she is learning who she is — Khadra demonstrates that she now has an identity as a woman who combines practices from both her Muslim and American cultures. Thus Khadra, along with other Muslim American women characters in memoirs and novels, collectively contribute to the destruction of stereotypes concerning Muslim American women, placing in their stead a revised, uncensored version of what it means to be Muslim in America. 63

Katherine Lashley Works Cited Abdurraquib, Samaa. “Hijab Scenes: Muslim Women, Migration, and Hijab in Immigrant Muslim Literature.” MELUS 31.4 (2006): 55–70. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007. Print. Darraj, Susan Muaddi. “Personal and Political: The Dynamics of Arab American Feminism.” Arab & Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, & Belonging. Ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber. 248–60. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2011. Print. Davis, Hilary E. “An Interview with Mohja Kahf.” Intercultural Education 18.4 (2007): 383–88. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Hazelton, PA: Pennsylvania State U, 2006. Print. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, Jane I. Smith, and Kathleen M. Moore. “Persistent Stereotypes.” Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today. Ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith, Kathleen M. Moore. 21–40. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Hasan, Asma Gull. “American Muslim Women: Between Two Worlds.” American Muslims: The New Generation. Ed. Asma Gull Hasan. 107– 29. New York and London: Continuum. 2002. Print. Kahf, Mohja. The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006. Print. Kayyali, Randa A. “Literature.” The Arab Americans. 125–28. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2006. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12.3 (1984): 333–58. Print. Smith, Jane I. “Women and the Muslim American Family.” Islam in America. 104–25. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print. Zine, Jasmin. “Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns.” Intercultural Education 18.4 (2007): 271–80. Print. 64

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 65-82

“I am she who will be free”: June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics Julia Sattler In her poetry, the late African American writer June Jordan (19362002) approaches cultural disputes, violent conflicts, as well as transnational issues of equality and inclusion from an all-encompassing, global angle. Her rather singular way of connecting feminism, female sexual identity politics, and transnational issues from wars to foreign policy facilitates an investigation of the role of poetry in the context of Transnational Feminisms at large. The transnational quality of her literary oeuvre is not only evident thematically but also in her style and her use of specific poetic forms that encourage cross-cultural dialogue. By “mapping connections forged by different people struggling against complex oppressions” (Friedman 20), Jordan becomes part of a multicultural feminist discourse that takes into account the context-dependency of oppressions, while promoting relational ways of thinking about identity. Through forging links and loyalties among diverse groups without silencing the complexities and historical specificities of different situations, her writing inspires a “polyvocal” (Mann and Huffmann 87) feminism that moves beyond fixed categories of race, sex and nation and that works towards a more “relational” narration of conflicts and oppressions across the globe (Friedman 40). Jordan’s poetry consciously reflects upon the experience of being female, black, bisexual, and American. Thus, her work speaks from an angle that is at the same time dominant and marginal. To put it in her own words: “I am Black and I am female and I am a mother and I am a bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist. And I mean to be fully and freely all that I am!” (“A New Politics of Sexuality” 2239). As an American, regardless of nationalist or antinationalist attitudes, Jordan is clearly a “western” poet rooted in and shaped by “western” political and religious ideas. At the same time, her work does not prioritize what could broadly be labeled as “western” thought or ideology and shows ideas

Julia Sattler that clearly go beyond such thought. Rather, Jordan’s poetry highlights (global) instances where (equal) rights are violated and where injustice is committed against a weaker Other; her poetry is a form of lyrical resistance against subjugation and unfair treatment of the powerless everywhere and regardless of sex, race, or class. When including groups outside of her own context, she steps beyond the established hierarchies and categories that even feminism oftentimes falls victim to, marking her as critical of the “western” tendency to appropriate the Other (Mohanty 18). Her active attempts to deconstruct “western” concepts such as colonialism and imperialism show a non-hierarchical approach to the Other and her ability to move beyond the reproduction of established discourses of what constitutes the “norm.” The incorporation of poetic forms, such as the Japanese haiku or tanka, and the reflection of Buddhism and Islam in her poetry, also make clear Jordan’s engagement with cultures outside of the “western” context. Despite these broad engagements, Jordan certainly does not ignore her own situatedness in the African American community. Rather, it is this very perspective that enables her to relate to struggles elsewhere. Her poetry not only addresses an experience that is larger than the experience of being an African American woman, but it also gives voice to those who are voiceless since their suffering is not always accessible to a more general audience despite, for example, news reporting. Her work is always written from a personal angle that does not always represent the standpoint of all African Americans or even all African American women. Thus, her voice, as a black woman’s voice, “both authenticates and limits her perspectives: she insists upon an individual voice that speaks from an African American perspective rather than speaking for all African Americans” (MacPhail 64). At the same time, it becomes evident in her poetry that there are different levels of suffering, that her suffering as a black American woman is not the same as the suffering of a woman in Somalia who has lost her family members. As Jordan herself stated in a 1987 interview: I have a tremendous instinctive aversion to the idea of ranking oppression. In other words for nobody to try and corner misery. I think it’s dangerous. It seems to me to be an immoral way of going about things. The difficulty here is the sloppiness of language. We call everything an 66

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics oppression, going to the dentist is an oppression, then the word does not mean anything. Revisions in our language might help and it might also steer us clear from saying something as useless as, but mine is this and yours is that. If I, a black woman poet and writer, a professor of English at State University, if I am oppressed then we need another word to describe a woman in a refugee camp in Palestine or the mother of six in a rural village in Nicaragua or any counterpart inside South Africa. (qtd. in Parmar 63) In her poetry, Jordan verbalizes suffering, places different sufferings in dialogue, but does not confuse them with daily necessities that may be described as “oppressions” in an inflationary use of the word. Her poetry establishes a dialogue among the oppressed without banalizing the suffering of the individual by emphasizing the humanity of each human being. It is significant that her poetry is not judgmental and does not convey that one suffering is worth more than another. Her politics of empathy for the Other challenge the established language that tends to be used in situations of war, violence and suffering. This, alongside her feminist engagement, places Jordan in a complicated relation to African American intellectualism and to black feminism. The proclamation of a “black” nation was, for example, used to (and often continues to) silence women. Since neither movement, meaning neither Black Nationalism nor feminism or its black variety, is traditionally suitable to address a wider, global, transnational audience because they remain very much focused on one single community instead of addressing a larger, global audience, Jordan cannot be firmly located in either context, and, as a global poet, does not want or need to be. The focus of her poetry, at most, puts her in line with third wave feminist ideas which started to move beyond the nation-state while taking into account differences between groups (Mann and Huffmann 66). The lack of attention and the silence on the part of the local as well as the global communities — power-hungry politicians — in the face of suffering is a recurring motif in Jordan’s work. Established borders of race, gender and nation are transgressed. The humanity of the Other is 67

Julia Sattler established in an inclusive manner: I did not say male/or female/I did not say Serbian/or Tutsi/I said/what tilts my head/into the opposite of fear/or dread/is anyone/who talks to me (“Poem for a Young Poet” 25-34). The idea of dialogue in Jordan’s poetry, which is evident in this short passage from “Poem for a Young Poet,” encourages communication across borders which traditionally defy such crossings. While it is certainly possible to argue that overcoming such limitations to address a community that is larger than a nation is one of the qualities that makes Jordan as a “transnational” poet, transnationalism in itself can assume many different meanings in this context and is “not always associated with dialogic energies and interstitial identities” (Ramazani 31). As Jahan Ramazini argues in his study on A Transnational Poetics (2009), transnationalism can also connote neoliberal ideologies, but in its literary version, it “may suggest a different disciplinary model of ‘citizenship’: instead of replicating the centripetal vortex of the nation-state or its dilated counterpart in unitary migrant communities, cross-cultural writing and reading can, if taken seriously […], evoke noncoercive and nonatavistic forms of transnational imaginative belonging” (31). Jordan’s poetic oeuvre connects the personal, the literary, the political, and the global. It calls for nonviolent forms of activism that unite people in their suffering, creating a new community to engage against injustices committed in the name of ethnicity, religion or ideology, all of which fail to recognize the humanity of the Other. It gives a voice to many marginalized groups and finds fault with what oftentimes comes across as modern-day American imperialism. It counters oppressive policy against minorities in the United States and abroad, and contests the media representation of global disasters by giving voice to the victims of war and oppression instead of merely describing these victims and the daily injustices with which they are confronted. While each instance of violence and oppression is specific, her poetry also addresses the idea that in the face of global struggle and oppression, it is necessary to look beyond the limiting binary of “white/Other,” even within the United States (Friedman 23). June Jordan’s poetry goes far beyond mainstream reporting on current events and beyond the public negotiation of oppression and humiliation of the Other. Jordan inscribes herself into global conflicts and disputes which have nothing to do with her own heritage and legacy, even instances 68

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics of violence which tend to be defined as “white,” such as the Northern Ireland conflict, or the war in Bosnia, or the debate around abortion. This allows her to deconstruct the traditional scope of African American writing and transcend borders, creating a community of the oppressed on a global scale. While on the one hand this shows the potential of relational narratives to connect people despite their different contexts and histories, it also gives credit to the idea that racial othering and oppression are not unique to the United States or the “western” context at large. Moreover, it illustrates that “[w]hen power is at stake […], people often resort to ethnic and racial othering to justify conflict. Whether as cause or effect of conflict, colonial, racial and ethnic division is a global phenomenon where people compete for resources. Such global instances of othering shatter the fixity of the white/other binary as exclusive explanation for all racial and ethnic conflict” (Friedman 26). Overcoming established borders has also been important to Jordan as a person and as an activist. In 1991, Jordan, who was also known as a playwright, essayist, teacher, and composer, founded the “Poetry for the People” program in the African American Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley, a project which is still vibrant today. The project, which aims to empower through the study of poetry, specifically by connecting art and activism, established a dialogue between the larger Berkeley community and the university. A lasting legacy of Jordan’s work, it continues to encourage exchange where there was previously silence. The establishment of this program, which is in direct connection with Jordan’s poetic oeuvre, exemplifies her focus on activism instead of “sit[ting] inside our sorrows, […] describ[ing] things to death,” which she perceives as “a kind of vanity or decadence” (qtd. in Parmar 62). Jordan’s audience, while encouraged to empathize with the oppressed and the suffering, is clearly a “western,” English-speaking and probably American one. This becomes evident in the specific ways in which this audience is addressed and incorporated into the text. Even though the content of the poems oftentimes travels far beyond the United States or developed nations as a whole, readers, in many cases, connect to the suffering Other despite their own privileged status. This is achieved by strategies in the poems which avoid othering and, instead, focus on the common humanity of all people. These strategies include: the use of dialogic patterns of writing, linking one event to another within a global context 69

Julia Sattler or creating an interface against which similar patterns of oppression across different cultures and contexts become evident; concentrating on people who are impacted by an event; and blending different poetic forms, which allows the audience to see their own culture from a new angle. Of course, these strategies are usually applied individually, and not concurrently in the same poem. All three strategies can be linked to the framework of transnationalism Shelley Fisher Fishkin established in her essay “Mapping Transnational American Studies.” Fishkin has termed the three categories which characterize recent work in Transnational Studies as “broadening of the frame,” “cross-fertilization,” and “renewed attention to travel and to how texts travel” (31). The first category elucidates that the United States is not a vacuum and that its history is closely intertwined with other, smaller and larger, histories. This enables the recognition of larger contexts of suffering and oppression (Fishkin 32). It also underscores that a decision that is taken in a developed country may have far-reaching consequences for people living elsewhere. By the same token, the same is true for decisions not taken, be it out of the non-recognition of the seriousness of the situation, or out of ignorance. The second category focuses on the influence of one culture on another, and vice versa. Cross-fertilization is thus a mutual process and can result in the emergence of new stories or new literary forms which incorporate ideas from many cultures (Fishkin 37). The third category — the focus on travel (literally) and the travel of texts — looks at transnational connections and cultural knowledge that can be acquired via travel, which involves leaving one’s familiar context (Fishkin 40). A very impressive and much contested example of a “blending” or “interfacing” of oppressions is found in “The Bombing of Baghdad.” In this poem, Jordan links the struggles of the Iraqi population to the suffering of the people in the Middle East, which is caused by American foreign policy — through the “bombings” delivered by the US army despite their essential helplessness — to the erasure of the Native populations within the United States. The poem blends three different perspectives: the speaker’s view on the situation in Iraq, her reflections on her own situatedness in the American context despite her opposition to the “bombings,” and her perspective on Custer’s attacks on the Native Americans and: their fragile/ temporary settlements/for raising children/dancing down the rain/and praying for the mercy of a herd of buffalo (48-51). While there are three 70

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics different stories told in the poem or three different narrative levels, they are directly linked to each other: this was Custer’s Next-to-Last-Stand/I hear Crazy Horse singing as he dies/I dedicate myself to learn that song/I hear that music in the moaning of the Arab world (41-44). In the final stanza of the poem, the three narrative levels merge into one, illustrating that there are parallels in the way the US army is engaging in violent acts against an innocent population to whom they feel superior — And all who believe only they possess/human being and therefore human rights/they no longer stood among the possibly humane” (73-75), but that essentially, the “Bombing of Baghdad” represents the same kind of violence that was delivered to the Native American population in the name of peace: And this is for Crazy Horse singing as he dies/because I live inside his grave/And this is for the victims of the bombing of Baghdad/because the enemy traveled from my house/to blast your homeland/into pieces of children/pieces of sand/And in the aftermath of carnage/perpetrated in my name/how should I dare to offer you my hand/how shall I negotiate the implications/of my shame? (94-105). The speaker in this poem is clearly speaking from a “western” perspective, as an American, when she recalls that: we bombed Baghdad/ we bombed Basra […]/we bombed everything that moved/we bombed everything that did not move (4-12). She clearly includes herself in the oppressive group which committed “these bombings/these ‘sorties’” (24) in her name, too. However, it becomes evident that she does not agree with the way her fellow countrymen are dealing with the perceived terrorist threat in Iraq. Instead of supporting the population, they commit “a terrorist undertaking” (85) or “an American/holocaust against the peoples of the Middle East” (89-90) that essentially leads to destruction of Iraqi society and infrastructure. The speaker also claims to recognize a pattern of violence against fragile populations that do not present any danger to those who feel superior and who are predestined to decide their fate. Poetry has the power to address the specific pains that go along with war, to expose the wrongs committed by an oppressor, and to reveal the specificities of a disaster that cannot be documented in the media. This is especially true because “[t]he news media tend to report, even sensationalize, racial and ethnic violence and to ignore efforts at building bridges across cultural divides” (Friedman 25). Poetry’s potential to engage in a different type of narration becomes evident, for example, in Jordan’s 71

Julia Sattler “Bosnia Bosnia”: Too bad/there is no oil/between her legs/that 4-year-old Muslim girl and/her 5-year-old sister/and the 16-year-old babysitter/and the 20-year-old mother of that four year-old/that Muslim child gang raped/ from dawn to dark to time becomes damnation/Too bad/there is no oil/ between her legs/Too bad there is no oil/between Sbrenica and Sarajevo/ and in-between the standing of a life/and genocide (1-16). Later in the same poem, connections are made to Somalia as well as to South Central L.A., the situation of homeless people, and drug-addicts — circumstances where people are suffering because there is no interest in their situation. Poetry, and specifically political poetry, disrupts the mainstream narrative about an event and its coverage. However, as this example suggests, it also has the potential to make connections that would not only be hard to recognize, but also problematic to voice in the wider political arena. “Bosnia Bosnia” makes evident that questions of survival, of genocide, of ignorance, of the global community looking away when wrong is committed, are oftentimes determined by issues of finance and profit instead of by examining how these forces affect people globally. The argument in this poem is that since there is no monetary profit in intervening in hunger in Somalia or racial violence in the United States, there is no intervention; had there been oil (or a different resource, for that matter), the situation would be much different. Certainly, the powerful metaphor of the oil between the little girl’s legs demonstrates the potential of poetry: something unspeakable is being conveyed here, and it is being expressed with a power of words that could never be reached by mere media reporting. This is not to say that media reporting generally avoids discussing issues such as rape or even violence, but rather, that poetry makes the true dimensions of the unspeakable event visible and tangible. It shows the intersections between the personal, the political, and the interests of global powerbrokers who are increasingly focused on profit in ways that cannot be achieved in an impersonal, quasi-objective, news report. The first lines of the poem establish a connection between a small child and its family and the larger conflict in Bosnia, making it very clear that ignorance has consequences, very real consequences, not only for the region as an abstract construct that may not mean much to an outsider, but that the region in fact stands for its people, for people who are suffering, little girls who are being raped in the absence of international interest in a 72

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics conflict that does not involve “oil.” The statement that it is just: Too bad/ there is no oil/between her legs (1-3) makes evident that the international community is making decisions about situations by measuring economic benefit. There is no awareness of the fact that people — women and children — are being affected by these actions. If one were to recognize and take seriously the humanity and precariousness of those affected, overlooking these consequences would not be possible. In the poem, metaphors fuse two radically separated realms of experience. Whereas a political explanation of the connection between oil interests and human rights can explain such dependencies rationally, the metaphor makes it apparent, in fact exemplifies, the interdependency in one single line. The absence of oil — a coincidental fact that cannot be influenced by the people — literally becomes the reason for the rape of the girl. This strategy of connecting the personal, unspeakable dimensions of the event with larger, international economic interests is impossible in mainstream media reporting. Through her poem, however, Jordan makes the humanitarian catastrophe of the war in Bosnia immediately and most painfully understandable. The creation of solidarity among women plays a special role in Jordan’s oeuvre. This means that women and women’s fates are often addressed in her work, such as in “Bosnia Bosnia.” She speaks directly to women, as mothers, sisters, and wives. She tries to establish a community of women who recognize each other’s humanity, each other’s pain, and each other’s losses in the face of oppression, regardless of their ethnic, religious, national, or sexual identity, and encourages them to organize in nonviolent protest to fight oppression. This is an important characteristic of her work, not only because feminist thinking is useful in economic and political struggles for freedom (Mohanty 1), but even more so because traditionally, “western” feminist thinking also does not differentiate enough between women from different backgrounds, signifying an appropriation of the Other that conflates women’s concerns and hinders solutions to the problems and struggles of women (Mohanty 17). From Jordan’s work it becomes evident that it is possible to do both at the same time, to speak to women on a transnational level, but to still understand that there are differences between different women in different settings and at different times. 73

Julia Sattler Jordan thus adds a female, and decidedly feminist, angle to the notion of a transnational poetics of ‘defying oppression.” In an interview conducted during her first visit to Britain, she critically evaluated her own perception of identity politics at the time, stating that We have been organizing on the basis of identity, around immutable attributes of gender, race and class for a long time and it doesn’t seem to have worked […]. We as black people have enormous problems everywhere in the world and we women have colossal problems everywhere in the world. I think there is something deficient in the thinking on the part of anybody who proposes either gender identity politics or race identity politics as sufficient, because every single one of us is more than whatever race we represent or embody and more than whatever category we fall into. We have other kinds of allegiances, other kinds of dreams that have nothing to do with whether we are white or not white (qtd. in Parmar 61). These ideas, along with her perception that “the Politics of Sexuality is the most ancient and probably the most profound arena for human conflict” because it is “deeper and more pervasive than any other oppression, than any other bitterly contested human domain” (“A New Politics of Sexuality” 2238) places Jordan, as an African American feminist and “global poet,” in an interesting place with regard to black intellectualism and African American art and poetry. All three notions, Jordan as a “global,” transnational poet, as a black intellectual, and as an African American writer, must be considered while contextualizing her as an all-encompassing voice of our time who transcends heteronormativity as well as oppressive policies against the voiceless. That being said, even though women across the world are implicated in her work, her audience remains “western.” The poem “What great grief has made the Empress mute” explicitly addresses a New York Times headline regarding the Japanese Empress Michiko and her nervous breakdown. While this was a taboo subject in Japan at the time, and there 74

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics was much debate about whether the Empress’s silence was of physical or mental origin, the poem gives voice to a whole list of reasons why she is unhappy, why she is essentially an oppressed woman, and why nothing that is being offered to her, and why none of her privileges as Empress, will console her in the long run. The poem is in fact a collection of statements that present possible answers to the initial question: Because it was raining outside the palace/Because there was no rain in her vicinity/ Because people kept asking her questions/Because nobody ever asked her anything/Because marriage robbed her of her mother/Because she lost her daughters to the same tradition (1-6). This poem once more clearly speaks to a “western” audience, and one that is not necessarily familiar with Japanese tradition or marriage custom, but one that is probably familiar with The New York Times’s headline asking the same question as the poem, which addresses the causes of the Empress’s silence. The poem’s structure is rather simple — it does not present complex reasoning or speculation as to why one would suffer from mental distress. However, it does underscore the suffering involved with the Empress’s existence as a person and the burden of tradition, specifically the burden of having to fulfill so many expectations connected to her status. The fact that her poetry includes, and is directed towards, the oppressed and voiceless — in the United States, in Somalia or Japan — certainly places June Jordan in line and in productive dialogue with other poets who have been described as (and have perceived themselves as) “global,” including as Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. This is a context in which Jordan situated herself, stating that: I too am a descendent of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully […] We do not apologize because we are not Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, or Elizabeth Bishop. If we are nothing to them, to those who love them, they are nothing to us! Or, as Whitman exclaimed: “I exist as I am, that is enough.” New World poetry moves into and 75

Julia Sattler beyond the light of the lives of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Agostinho Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Edward Brathwaite. I follow this movement with my own life. I am calm and I am smiling as we go. (“For the Sake of a People’s Poetry” 78) Jordan here sees herself as part of a very specific context, namely as a descendant of other “global writers.” She also expresses her feeling of rejection by, and rejection of, writers with a more aestheticist poetic approach, which she embraces since she is interested in being understood by the people instead of experimenting with poetic form, to connect different places across the globe, and to help individuals recognize the power they possess to resist oppression. Jordan speaks from her own stance as an African American woman and as an activist for human rights, which adds to the complexity of her poetry. She wages “War against War” with poetic weapons, offering “a model for poet-activists attempting that difficult balance between working at the art of poetry and contributing to the effort to resist war and violence” (Metres 171). This “poetics of resistance” plays out in her writing, her defiance of oppressive traditions, and in her dialogic attempts to address questions of justice from a feminist, African American and transnational stance. This is also true of Jordan’s attitude regarding religion. Overall, while African Americans tend to be organized around liberation theologies both Christian and Islamic, Jordan deconstructs religion as an ideology of power and exploitation. This is also something that makes her unique with regard to African American religious beliefs. Jordan’s rejection of heteronormativity and traditional versions of Christian and “western” thought is most forcefully expressed in one of her later poems, “Kissing God Goodbye.” This poem appeared in an eponymous collection of Jordan’s poetry written between 1991 and 1997 which contains examples from most of Jordan’s poetic genres. It features love poetry as well as explicitly political poems; there are texts which criticize US foreign policy and military involvement abroad as well as reflections on the problems of contemporary American society and what could be described as “western” thought at large, namely poems addressing “western” cultural as well as religious beliefs. Kissing God Goodbye thus combines all of the different facets of Jordan’s poetic work. 76

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics The title poem “Kissing God Goodbye” is a “Poem in the face of Operation Rescue,” responding to the anti-abortion and anti-homosexuality movement. The focus is clearly on the rejection of same-sex love based on the supposed biblical argument that the Christian God denied same-sex love due to the procreative imperative which can only be fulfilled in a relationship between males and females. In the poem, the Christian God is revealed as a ridiculous, cruel, brutal manipulator who cannot be taken seriously on any issue, including abortion and homosexuality. In this case, Jordan chooses to attack the Christian God, who is widely used to justify the oppression of the Other. The speaker in the poem responds to the conservative and reactionary adherents of a movement, such as “Operation Rescue,” who construct their God as almighty and revengeful against everyone who differs from what is considered to be the “norm.” Thus a very specific and reactionary fantasy of the Christian God is depicted in this poem, and the speaker wants to eliminate such an oppressive ruler. The poem is therefore not a rejection of all religious beliefs; rather, it is a refusal to accept the way God is constructed via “Operation Rescue.” The poem employs wording that is not just uncommon, but usually considered heretical in a Christian religious context. The God described in the poem is called a: big mouth/woman-hating/super/heterosexist heterosexual/kind of a guy guy (9-13) […] someone/who invented a snake/ an apple and a really/retarded scenario so that/down to this very day/it is not a lot of fun/to give birth to a son of a gun (24-29) and who had “some serious problems/of perspective” (36-37), as He had no help in the process of the world’s creation. The speaker rejects the notion of the world with all its evils, with: alleyways of death/and acid rain/and infant mortality rates/ and sons of the gun/and something called the kitchenette/and trailer trucks to kill and carry/beautiful trees out of their natural/habitat (15-22) […] a world created by a/single/male/head of household (49-51) as claimed by fundamentalist streams of Christianity who take the biblical story of the creation literally. The God who is described in this poem is not a loving father, and not a respectful character, but rather someone who enforces the suppression of women, the suppression of the marginalized, and who forces people to victimize their own children. The cruelty of this heterosexist God is countered by instances of loving behavior in the world, by people taking care of and loving each 77

Julia Sattler other “in the middle of this lunatic lottery” (93). The examples given from the Bible in this poem are David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi. This notion of love is contrasted with a repetition of the idea that this “heterosexist heterosexual/kind of a guy guy” (186-187) apparently still believed that “he decided who could live and who would die” (188). The poem then turns into a lengthy list of names, naming those “who love” (192), listing first the men — including David and Jonathan — and then the women, including Ruth and Naomi. The listing of these names, emphasizing that “our names become/the names of the dead” (228-229), creates a community of homosexual lovers, of men and women who are equal to each due to love and respect. At the same time, it is a community of the oppressed, of those who die for loving the “wrong” people. With regard to a different poem by Jordan, “Poem about my Rights,” Peter Erickson has observed that it testifies to “the connection between naming and identity, to the power of language to deform the self” (221). “Kissing God Goodbye” deploys a very similar mechanism by naming of those “who love” (192), who are no longer anonymous in this poem, but who are enumerated and thus personalized by their first names. They are no longer members of the “tribes of the abomination” (233), they become “us”: our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and neighbors and co-workers and friends. Despite individual differences, this notion suggests a universal community of those who “love” and who are unjustly accused of loving the wrong people. Certainly, while it can be argued that the poem speaks to an “American” audience, it is also possible that it addresses the global community of oppressed Others. Around the world, people are threatened because they are perceived as Other, as marginalized because of their sexual orientation, and this oppression is justified by claiming that “God” did not want them to be different in this way. The fact that “Kissing God Goodbye” opposes the “western” context becomes especially shocking because the “West” usually perceives itself as “liberal” and “advanced.” Yet, outdated practices of Othering are still firmly in place and must be overcome even within the American community. Understanding that this struggle takes place globally, uniting people across national borders in order to end discrimination, will, however, only become possible if individuals recognize that they are not alone in their pain, that there is a community of “those who love” that transcends borders of nation, race, and religion. 78

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics While the poem first creates an “imaginary community” including past and present people “who love,” the poem also assumes a decidedly feminist stance with a first person speaker who proudly announces that: my name is not Abraham/my name is not Moses/Leviticus/Solomon/Cain or Abel/my name is not Matthew/Luke/Saul or Paul/My name is not Adam (235-238), referencing the men upon which the biblical community was established according to Christian tradition, then proclaiming that “My name is female/my name is freedom” (239-240). In an almost chant-like pattern, the speaker describes her own attributes, showing her capacity to resist the idea that a cruel male makes decisions for her. It openly suggests the speaker’s decidedly female attributes, which boastfully allow her to reject that someone else — God — decides over her life: He cannot eat at my table/He cannot sleep in my bed/He cannot push me aside/He cannot make me commit or contemplate/suicide (256-260). Instead of allowing this male who is “not [her] Lord” (276) to decide her life, the speaker claims that “I am she who will be free” (269), and that while her name “is the name of the one who loves,” “his name is not the name of those who love the living/and the dead” (281-282), building a stark contrast between the community she created earlier in the poem through the act of naming and “him” who cannot control their lives. The poetic community of those “who love” reaches from the past into the present, thus transcending time, place and nation. It is a community of men and women who share their losses and grief and who should not allow a heteronormative Christian God to exert any kind of control over their lives. The community constructed here emerges out of the shared experience of being declared illegitimate. Yet, the poem also conveys a qualitative difference between the experiences of being male and female. The situation of women differs from that of men because women are oppressed regardless of sexual orientation and their life choices. According to the ideology of the Creator as perceived by the speaker, women are beaten by the fact that they are female. They have to bear the pain of birth, they are perceived as unclean, and from birth they are worth less than a male child. This struggle unites women despite their ethnic, religious and sexual differences. In other words, whenever a woman suffers oppression by a man, all women are included in this act and therefore must unite in order to defy it. 79

Julia Sattler The poem pays tribute to different experiences related to gender and to what Jordan referred to in a 1991 essay as “male subjugation of human beings because they are female” (“A New Politics of Sexuality” 2238). The poem specifically empowers members of a marginalized community and women at large. The ideas in “Kissing God Goodbye” are echoed in “A New Politics of Sexuality,” especially with regard to her own experience as a bisexual: If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation: to insist upon complexity, to insist upon the validity of all the components of social/sexual complexity, to insist upon the equal validity of all of the components of social/sexual complexity. This seems to me like a unifying, 1990s mandate for revolutionary Americans planning to make it into the twentyfirst century on the basis of the heart, on the basis of an honest human body, consecrated to every struggle for justice, even struggle for equality, every struggle for freedom. (“A New Politics of Sexuality” 2241) Many of the issues addressed in this essay and in “Kissing God Goodbye” are still relevant; her poetry can still serve as an inspiration for creating transnational feminist communities based on the acceptance of inherently different backgrounds and perceptions. The line “I am she who will be free” acquires a larger meaning in this context: only if individuals step beyond their immediate worlds and unite as humans, in solidarity, in the face of oppression, war, and violence can freedom become a reality. Jordan’s poetry encourages its audience to recognize both, the humanity of the Other and the power of language in the nonviolent global fight against oppression by highlighting connections that go far beyond the “western” context. By relating to women’s global struggles, her poetry makes it possible for women to find common entrance points into a discussion that transcends local activism to show that solidarity can be achieved despite differences in ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation. It thus 80

June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics points towards creating a dialogic version of feminism that is not only transnational in terms of its outreach, but also in terms of overcoming “western” privilege. Works Cited Erickson, Peter. “The Love Poetry of June Jordan.” Callaloo 26 (1986): 221–34. Print. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Mapping Transnational American Studies.” Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. 31–74. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Print. Friedman, Susan S. “Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse.” Signs 21.1 (1995): 1–49. Print. Gates, Henry L., Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1997. Print. Hebel, Udo J., ed. Transnational American Studies. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Print. Jordan, June: “For the Sake of a People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” 1979. Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems. 69-79. London: Virago Press, 1980. Print. -----. “A New Politics of Sexuality.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry L. Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. 2238–41. New York: Norton, 1997. Print. -----. Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. Print. MacPhail, Scott. “June Jordan and New Black Intellectuals.” African American Review 33.1 (1999): 57–61. Print. Mann, Susan A., and Douglas J. Huffmann. “The Decentering of Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave.” Science & Society 69.1 (2005): 59–91. Print. Metres, Philip. “June Jordan’s War against War.” Peace Review 15.2 (2003): 171–77. Print. 81

Julia Sattler Mohanty, Chandra T. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke UP., 2003. Print. Parmar, Pratibha. “Other Kinds of Dreams.” Feminist Review 31 (1989): 55–65. Print. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2009. Print.

82

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 83-88

Transnational Feminist Book Reviews Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Ed. Ella Shohat. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. P/bk 595 pp. ISBN 978-0-26269261-8. Price $36.00. In the age of globalism and multiculturalism, the concept of feminism is constantly being challenged and redefined to reflect the shifting borders of previously unproblematic disciplinary territories. As labor, ideologies, economic resources, industrial products, and capital are redistributed by the free-flow of material and intellectual assets across geo-political, linguistic, cultural, economic, social, and religious borders, feminists are renegotiating fundamental questions such as who defines feminism, what is feminism, and what does it accomplish? The multifaceted discourse of feminism therefore continuously experiences a critical “identity crisis” because of a centrifugal force among feminists around the world that re-historicizes feminism within a transnational context. Just as multiculturalism in a transnational age emphasizes multilateral exchanges of ideas and information and mutual influences among different cultures, multicultural feminism treats unique yet inter-connected feminist narratives as critical nodes in a web of overlapping discourses whose significations are perpetually in flux. It is under this relativized framework that the edited volume of Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age finds its voice and political stance. As the editor Ella Shohat claims in the illuminating introduction, Talking Visions “attempts […] to place diverse gendered/sexed histories and geographies in dialogical relation in terms of the tensions and overlappings that take place ‘within’ and ‘between’ cultures, ethnicities, nations” (1). Such de-centralizing efforts continue the critical discourse against Eurocentrism that Ella Shohat conscientiously advocates in her previous book, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, which she co-authored with Robert Stam in 1994. What contextualizes both projects is an attempt to disrupt a fossilizing tendency in contemporary academic disciplines that imposes artificial and arbitrary

Jinhua Li limits and definitions on gender and cultural studies. Pitted against the hegemonic and normative Eurocentrism is what Stam and Shohat term “polycentric multiculturalism,” which “calls for a profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities” (47). The polycentric interconnectedness between cultures and expressions in Unthinking Eurocentrism evolves into multi-voiced articulations by non-western feminists in Talking Visions, which creates a “polyphonic space where many critical voices engage in a dialogue in which no one voice hopefully muffles the others” (2). But these divergent and diverse narratives do not necessarily aim to create a harmonious orchestration; rather, they explore unchartered grounds for a feminist practice that resists singular and binary definitions. Talking Visions was published at a time when the institutionalized feminist discourse was still largely defined by binary oppositions such as the West/Third World, mainstream/diversity, canon/world literature, and heterosexuality/gay-lesbian-bisexuality. This volume was intended to provide a site of contestation for a potential breaking down of these paradigmatic axes. In the book’s profound and intriguing introduction, the editor expounds on the significance as well as the urgency for a multicultural feminist movement. What is centralized as a powerful factor that necessitates such a movement is a globalized traveling of images, sounds, consumer products, and modes of productions. This transnationality, in turn, results in a cross-fertilization of ideas, identity formation, nationstate politics, and intellectual debates. Specifically, this tendency incubates interdisciplinary studies that question the debilitating dichotomies that put feminism in opposition to hetero-hegemonic-patriarchal oppressions. Alternatively, Talking Visions strives to position multicultural feminism in relation to a hybrid web of interlinked modalities and practices. In other words, multicultural feminism disengages from the oppositional position against patriarchy, so it is not defined or regulated by various binarisms that are essentially dualistic. Talking Visions focuses on the voices of non-western feminists in a variety of expressive forms, such as digitized images, reflective essays, testimonial narratives, and performance pieces, and from diversified perspectives, including social activists, artists, scholars, and curators. This volume neither consciously enters these articulations in dialogue with each other nor categorizes them into neatly defined topics, but is edited “so as to ‘relationalize’ the academic corrals called ‘Women’s Studies’, ‘gender and 84

Transnational Feminist Text Reviews sexuality studies,’ ‘postcolonial studies,’ ‘ethnic studies,’ and ‘area studies,’ and to show how they intersect with one another, intimately and, at times, abrasively” (42). It is safe to assume, therefore, that Talking Visions attempts to create a radically equalizing system where different voices resonate in a spontaneous synergy. Moreover, this reimagined multicultural feminism utilizes these interrelated narratives strategically to empower women of color and traditionally marginalized groups in a globalized spatial-temporality. It is apparent that Talking Visions is contextualized by the ubiquity of globalizing efforts and the dissolving of boundaries as powerfully reflected in transnationalism and interdisciplinarity. It reveals the visionary awareness of urgency that traditional Western feminism is inadequately equipped when the world is becoming homogenous materially but heterogeneous ideologically. The twenty-five essays collected in Talking Visions represent an admirable effort in their formal inconformity to the elitist theoretical writings in the academe and their conceptual focus on hybridity, relativity, and multiplicity. Juxtaposing words and images, these essays use personal stories, medical research findings, life inspirations, conversational exchanges, and other unconventional expressive strategies to demonstrate the invigorating potentials of multicultural feminist critique. Although some essays are written by renowned feminists such as bell hooks and Caren Kaplan, the majority are from less academically established writers. Both scholars of feminist writings as well as lay readers who are curious about this developmental stage in feminism would find this refreshingly arranged volume delightful and thought-provoking. Talking Visions was published more than fifteen years ago, but its keenly felt vigilance against intellectual complacency and Eurocentric nationalist feminism remains relevant in contemporary times, when feminists around the world have still yet to learn to mobilize their multifarious differences and promote multicultural polycentricity in feminist critiques. Works Cited Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Jinhua Li University of North Carolina Asheville 85

M. Angela Jansen The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time. Eds. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner. New York: Columbia UP., 2012. P/bk 344 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-15449-9. Price $29.50. The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time suggests the binary “global/intimate” as a less biased alternative for the commonly used twofold “global/local.” Without a doubt, in a time of “shrinking distances, virtual relationships, and increasing transnational interdependencies” (1), it is crucial to study the effects of globalization on the individual. Yet, as an anthropologist, I believe the intimate is a product of the local and am not quite sure of the added value of this alternative duality. The editors do acknowledge, however, that intimacy “is not purely personal but takes on specific political, social and cultural meanings in different contexts” (3). Feminist critique of the local/global dualism in academic literature on globalization focuses on the notion that “it imaginatively constructs the local as a defense against powerful global forces in a way that seems to confirm the force and inevitability of certain modes of global capitalist expansion […] in ways that call up established gender hierarchies of feminine and masculine” (2). The alternative that the editors propose is and simultaneously is not a binary. “While irrefutably a pairing, it juxtaposes and resists the flattening effect of most binaries by bringing together terms that, we will argue, offer an implicit critique of one another” (2). Rather, the editors contend that the global and the local are neither static categories nor mutually exclusive. In other words, “in shifting from the idea of the local to that of the intimate, we are employing terms that are not defined against one another but rather draw their meaning from more elliptically related domains” (2). Thus, by stepping out of hierarchical ontologies of scale, micro/macro frameworks, and the general and specific, “intimacy,” the editors argue, becomes “potentially and productively disruptive of […] geographical binaries” (2). According to the editors, the methodologies of feminism have proven particularly adept at exposing the universalist assumptions of international relations, social theory, and geographical models. “Feminism turns a skeptical eye on the occasionally uncritical affirmations of globalization” (2). They state it is a feminist collective belief that the analytical lens of gender relations can help to produce a more nuanced, complete, and just 86

Transnational Feminist Text Reviews account of the world (3). An important point they make is that discourses of globalization often rely on stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, categories of us and them and powerful and powerless. Nevertheless, I am uncertain that all the contributions to this volume successfully managed to avoid these stereotypes. For example, at some point Agnese Fidecao claims in her chapter that “the intimate is idealized in Western cultures, where it is closely bound up with the home and is protected by privacy” (90). This not only automatically implies that this is never the case in the so-called “non-West,” but also simultaneously confirms the “we” versus “them” binary. Neither am I entirely convinced that the focus on the intimate guarantees a more “ethical stance toward the world […] an approach that neither simplifies nor stereotypes but is attentive to specific histories and geographies” (20), although, undoubtedly, this is an important objective for which to strive. While the editors clearly state in their introduction that they wish to give a non-Americentric vision of the “intimate/global” binary, a number of the case studies presented in the volume provide interesting analyses of contemporary American society. For example, I was struck by the importance given to the cultural origins of second and third generation immigrants in the United States. In Fidecaro’s contribution on Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening essays, the Caribbean descent of Kincaid and the fact that she is a black woman, weigh heavily in the analysis of her writing, even though she has been living in the United States longer than she ever lived in her place of birth, Antigua. Also Marianne Hirsch’s chapter “Objects of Return and Nancy Millers’ Letter from Argentina” testifies how strongly the children of (Jewish) Polish and Russian immigrants are raised with the cultural heritage of their parents, even though they are born and raised in the US. Also, Rachel Adams’s chapter, “Widening Circles”, on her child with Downs Syndrome struck me as uncomfortably representative of contemporary American society and its obsession with perfection. As the author formulates it: “[M]y research had made me painfully aware of the discrimination faced by people with disabilities in the United States. I knew that my baby […] had been born into a world that has little tolerance for his kind of imperfection” (107). She even goes as far as admitting that these people are “invisible” within American society: “I was surprised to find that two boys with Down syndrome already lived on my street […] I wondered why I hadn’t seen them before. Or maybe I had seen them, 87

and then quickly looked away” (111). Finally, Inderpal Grewal’s chapter “Security Moms” made me aware of the atmosphere of fear dominating American middle-class society — a fear driven by patriotic nationalism. “Nothing matters more to me than the safety of my home and the survival of my homeland,” the author quotes from a so-called “security mom” who has not only “studied the faces on the FBI’s most wanted list” but has also educated her four-year-old daughter about Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. “She knows there are bad men in the world trying to kill Americans everywhere” (196). M. Angela Jansen London College of Fashion

88

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 89-138

Book Reviews Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation. Belén Vidal. London and New York: Wallflower, 2012. P/bk 150 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-16203-6. Price £14.00. As global media has spent a week commemorating with mixed feelings the legacy of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after her passing aged 87, we are reminded of how the heritage film continues to be an essential asset for the British filmmaking industry in its attempt of producing quality films with a broad appeal that are capable of competing with Hollywood blockbusters. Little more than a year ago British multiplexes were playing The Iron Lady, a dramatization of Thatcher’s life that aimed to replicate the Academy Award successes achieved by The King’s Speech the year before, and one that anticipated the current reassessment of Thatcher’s controversial role in British politics and history. Recent events also remind us of how, in their negotiation between the representation of private and public lives of historical figures, heritage films are often preoccupied with investigating the role of the media in contemporary society through allegorical lenses pointed at either the recent or remote past, this being one of the many insightful points made in the object of this review. Belén Vidal’s latest study of the heritage film addresses extensively the three major strands of British films of this type, the monarchy film, the literary adaptation of classics of Western literature and the artist’s biopic, the latter being a subject matter she had already engaged with in her Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic. Just like the best works in Wallflower’s Shortcuts series, Vidal’s Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation proves to be an excellent survey of the existing academic literature on the subject, with particular emphasis on Andrew Higson’s seminal writings in the field, and is therefore highly recommended to those looking either for a starting point in the familiarization with this niche of film studies or a ‘roadmap’ to be used to discern which readings to embark on to engage further with the topic. In

Giacomo Boitani fact, Vidal concludes her Introduction by specifying that her work “does not purport to be a comprehensive mapping of the genre. Instead, it seeks to put forward a methodological reflection about the heritage film as a film studies term” (5-6) to the point that the book could be easily titled “the heritage film debate” also. As Vidal points out “the heritage film […] needs to be considered a critically or theoretically constructed genre rather than an industrial one” (2); it is therefore appropriate to focus on its positioning within the film studies arena and to give an account of the current shift in its critical reception, from the widespread opinion in the 1990s that heritage films represented little more than “reductive images of ‘Englishness’ [that] focused on the traditional values and lifestyles of the upper-middleclass and the aristocratic elite” (10) to the current reconsideration that different films of this type often utilize such a “wide range of styles that [they] are not amenable to a unique ideological reading.” (33) This choice of privileging the discussion of the positioning of the heritage film label in an attempt to define the genre itself, however, proves to be somewhat problematic when Vidal “interrogate[s] the existence of the heritage film as a European genre” (3-4). By doing so she implies that a number of European films made in the last two decades participate in delineating the notion of a European identity in a similar way that British heritage films did and continue doing with British national identity. An historical account of this group of European films and the analysis of some of the most notable ones is aptly conducted in Chapter Two: however, the lack of a structural definition of what defines a heritage film beyond the fact that it is a quality, middlebrow product set in the past made from the 1990s onwards is something of a missed opportunity. Vidal contends that the European heritage film genre emerged “as a type of film strongly favoured by investors and funding bodies alike” (64) that is “likely to export well across national borders” (64) as a result of a de-nationalizing effect set in motion by geo-political phenomena such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and by more specifically cinematic ones like the end of the ‘new waves’. This argument could be easily agreed with if one assumed that films of this type radically differ on either a structural, ideological or stylistic level from European films made in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, but this is not the case. Could European, often co-produced historical films such as Luigi Magni’s Nell’Anno del Signore (1969), Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970) or Victor Erice’s El Espiritu de la Colmena (1973) be labeled as ‘heritage films’? Vidal’s compelling discussion of the heritage film prompts us to believe that this 90

Book Reviews argument in favor of a European heritage genre may generate more from the debate itself than from the tropes of the films involved. In other words, this notion of European heritage film could be first and foremost the result of the fact that film critics and scholars are less preoccupied with the ideas of film authorship and national cinema today than they were in the past. Another minor criticism of an otherwise excellent work relates to the choice of the selected case studies: the author offers a comprehensive account of the role that older heritage films such as Chariots of Fire (1981) and Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988) played in informing the critical reception of the British and European genres; however the extensive analysis of the variety of representational strategies that can be found within them is carried out by discussing in detail The Queen (2006), Joyeux Noël (2005) and Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), three films that were released in the space of three years. Since the work does an excellent job of mapping a debate that has raged in film studies for the last twenty years and the narrative journey it proposes, perhaps Vidal might have been better advised to select films more distant in time from one another. Nonetheless the merits of the book are far superior than its shortcomings; the author’s discussion of the funding and corporate dynamics that exist between film and television production companies is particularly detailed, and supported by insightful analyses of how such dynamics are reflected in the representational strategies seen on screen. The author’s interrogation of the dual objectives at the center of heritage film production (the desire for national particularity and cultural diversity, coupled with the need for broad appeal and commercial recognizability), works particularly well in the articulation of the heritage films’ contentious positioning in film criticism today. Works Cited Chariots of Fire. Dir. Hugh Hudson. Perf. Ian Charleson, Ben Cross, Ian Holm. Enigma Productions, 1981. Film. Cinema Paradiso. Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore. Perf. Philippe Noiret, Enzo Cannavale, Antonella Attili. Cristaldifilm/ Les Films Ariane, 1988. Film. 91

Giacomo Boitani El Espiritu de la Colmena [aka The Spirit of the Beehive]. Dir. Victor Erice. Perf. Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent. Elias Querejeta Producciones, 1973. Film. Girl with a Pearl Earring. Dir. Peter Webber. Perf. Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson. Archer Street Productions/ Pathé Pictures International, 2003. Film. Joyeux Noël. Dir. Christian Carion. Perf. Diane Kruger, Benno Fürmann, Guillaume Canet. Nord-Ouest Productions/ Senator Film Productions, 2005. Film. The King’s Speech. Dir. Tom Hooper. Perf. Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter. Weinstein Company/ UK Film Council, 2010. Film. The Iron Lady. Dir. Phyllida Lloyd. Perf. Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant. Pathé/ Film 4/ UK Film Council, 2012. Film. Nell’Anno del Signore [aka The Conspirators]. Dir. Luigi Magni. Perf. Nino Manfredi, Enrico Maria Salerno, Claudia Cardinale. Franco Films/ Les Films Corona, 1969. Film. The Queen. Dir. Stephen Frears. Perf. Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell. Pathé Pictures International/ Granada Film Productions, 2006. Film. Vidal, Belén. Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. Print. Waterloo. Dir. Sergei Bondarchuk Perf. Rod Steiger, Christopher Plummer, Orson Welles. Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1970. Film. Giacomo Boitani Independent Scholar

92

Book Reviews Laura Wagner, Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel … The Uncensored Book Reviews of Classic Images 2001-2010. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media, 2010. P/bk 248 pp. ISBN 978-1-59393-503-X. Price $17.96. Criticism, according to the theorist Anis Shivani, has an important role to play in contemporary literary cultures, as a means to “advance good writing and create new readers.” It provides a means for tyro writers to realize their “most individualized dreams and ambitions” through “speculative, generalized” work, “a mere tip of the iceberg for the knowledge contained within it [i.e. the text being criticized]. It must set itself up as an equal and opposing force against the work of the imagination” (Shivari). Criticism should pronounce judgment in a way that encourages rather than dissuades, so as not to destroy any writer’s self-confidence. As a work of film criticism, Let Me Tell You … fails on both counts. Laura Wagner obviously cares passionately about classic films: in the introductory chapter she recalls how at the age of five she would spend hours poring over film reference books. She has obviously reviewed texts of varying quality – good as well as bad. However her principal shortcoming as a critic lies in her mistaken assumption of a privileged position, a self-proclaimed “expert” on classic films who judges books harshly if they do not meet her exacting standards. This is no bad thing in itself, but Wagner uses (or should it be abuses) her position to write the kind of pseudo-witty rhetoric that is designed to show off. Rather than trying to broaden our understanding of writing and its potential, she always goes for the cheap laugh. Here are a few choice examples; in one review she describes the author’s style as “peculiar” as she “went blurry-eyed keeping up with the over 7,387 exclamation points that are used throughout. Give it a rest already” (44-5). On another occasion she advises an author to “stop caterwauling and stop shooting the dead horse, already” (I’ve no idea what the word “already” is doing in that sentence) (47). Another writer is berated for their “specious writing” and “lofty claim[s]” that give the text “a malicious tone” (76). Wagner’s voice becomes more strident as the book progresses; another text described as “stale and trite” evidently contains “warped fantasies, about long-dead stars” that apparently reveal “nothing more than the sickness of today’s publishing industry […] it’s sad to remember that some people [which people?] believe all this crap” (77). Wagner’s writing is stuffed full of redundant words and phrases. While claiming that one text has been “marred by almost nonexistent 93

Richard Prentiss editing” (111), she denounces another as “a shame and a waste. Give me an aspirin, please. Make it two” (119). On another occasion she claims that a text has “a strange aura of bitterness” (129) – a comment which we might make about Wagner herself. Confronted with what she claims are poorly written texts, she allows her bitterness to run away with her, writing the kind of rhetoric that students (especially students of criticism) are dissuaded from producing very early on in their academic lives. One review ends with the mock-reflective “Ah youth. It’s wasted on the young”; another has her claiming that she needs “more than a few aspirins” to cope with a particularly convoluted writing-style (158), Reading a book about Ronald Reagan is an experience “I hope that none of my readers ever suffer through in their lifetimes” (190). The effect of reading so much negative comment is truly dispiriting; if the reviewing process is so painful for her, why does she continue to do it? The answer is self-evident; like an old-style schoolmarm she delights in scolding her unfortunate charges (the authors) and making them stand in the corner for their miserable efforts. Wagner admits that she has received a torrent of abusive mail from disgruntled writers and their friends. However it’s clear she believes that her “innocent little reviews” should not necessarily cause such a stir. Her principal task as she sees it is to protect her readers from “those [authors] who prey on them [classic Hollywood films] in the guise of writing about them” (27). It is a shame that she assumes such an elevated view of her job. In truth she’s a lazy writer with at best a limited understanding of how criticism should work, or what its purpose might be. Far from being speculative or generalized in terms of purpose, Let Me Tell You … is nothing more than hack-work, the kind of material educators might give to students as an example of how not to write criticism. Works Cited Shivari, Anis. “What Should Be the Function of Criticism Today?” Subtropics: The Literary Magazine from the University of Florida 13 (Winter 2012). Web. 7 Oct. 2013. Richard Prentiss Independent Scholar 94

Book Reviews American Smart Cinema. Claire Perkins. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press., 2012. h/bk 192pp. ISBN. 978-0-7486-4074-4. Price £65.00. American independent cinema has, for some time, been considered to be in a transitional or contested space. Whether it is seen in the context of Indiewood, mini-majors or major-minis, the field of study has struggled to define the contemporary formation of a cinema both within and outside the major studios. Claire Perkins’s American Smart Cinema explores a non-dominant trend in American cinema that emerges in the late 1990s, a cycle of films created by a number of auteurist figures such as Todd Solondz, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, P. T. Anderson, Tamara Jenkins, as well as “adjunct” (29) figures Hal Hartley and Whit Stillman. A tendency “‘broadly categorizesed in terms of a predilection for irony, black humour, fatalism and relativism” (3), the smart film, Perkins argues, is “a site of transformation, plurality and potential in contemporary American filmmaking” (165). The task is “not to define but to demonstrate the sensibility” in the ways that the smart film is “principally understood not as a semantic end in itself but as evidence of the conflicted stance these films take toward cinema history” (16). Taking her cue from Jeffrey Sconce’s 2002 Screen article “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart Film’”, Perkins examines a set of American films that have fallen roughly into what she terms the ‘commercial/independent cinema’ (2). While she acknowledges previous discourses of independence or Indiewood-isation, Perkins acknowledges understands the “porosity” of such definitions or dialogues between commercial and independent cinemas on the level of economics, theme or history. Consequently, Perkins describes the smart film variously as distinguished by “tone” as a “sensibility”, a “tendency”, an “aesthetic” (16), a “thematic fixation” (77), but acknowledges that the designation of smartness is qualified, “partial and open” (29) or that the “smart delineation” is elastic (40) and “never […] exact” (16). The book points not to an industrial designation of American cinemas, as recent studies, such as Alisa Perren’s Indie, Inc. Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s, or Yannis Tzioumakis’s Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market (both 2012), have done, but 95

Steven Rawle a textual approach in which the smart film loosely takes on attributes of a genre. Split into five overarching themes or lines of continuity, the book’s chapters cover issues of authorship, narrative, melodrama, music and suburban utopianism (or lack thereof). Each of the chapters understands the smart cycle as a series of continuities, disjunctions or ironic engagements with previous waves in American or world cinema. The smart tendencies of authorship are determined by “serialisation, synchronicity and self-reflexivity” (45) in Hal Hartley’s Flirt (1995), and Whit Stillman’s “Yuppie” trilogy (Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998). Noting the international art cinema’s tendency to situate authorial self-reflexivity in the figure of the disconnected trilogy or triptych film, Perkins identifies a similar tendency in the smart film’s approach, where the trio is used as a means of experimentation, double-voiced address and a transformation of filmic time and space, where the attempt is made not to undermine the authorial voice as a means of distance, but “‘to pluralise and intensify what is said in a positive narrativisation of auteurism itself”’ (46). Subsequent chapters extend the discourse surrounding sequelizing and serialization, the second looking at the extended crisis of American cinema. Turning to Gilles Deleuze and the action-image, the smart film extends the crisis of the classical Hollywood action-image that began in the Renaissance period of New Hollywood. As that period expressed its disaffection against the backdrop of Vietnam, the smart film’s antipathy is largely the dysfunctional suburban families of The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2007) and Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004) where the intensified and restless schema of the action-image’s milieux are always and already transformed prior to action. What is useful in Perkins’s situation of the smart phenomenon in this form is her positioning of the smart film as a response to highconcept blockbuster style that comes between it and New Hollywood. “American cinema’s second significant cycle of experimentation”, is not a dominant form, but an adjunct to blockbuster style, sharing the concerns for intensified style at a level of form that “disables the sensory-motor connections of classic continuity” (74). Hence, it remains a commercial cinema, something that potentially distances the cycle from the more marginal independent cinemas of later movements like Mumblecore. The contemporary counterpoint to the smart film, Perkins contends, was the new-brutality films of Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher. 96

Book Reviews These films ironize their address through the combination of bubblegum pop-culture with ultra-realist violence, while the smart film’s own blank, ironic address resembles the already iconic melodramas of the 1950s where the distance and use of what Perkins terms the “music-image” operate in a doubled “register where affect is qualified but fully felt” (124) like those melodramas that prefigure “aristocratic” smart films like Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). This extends into the “satire, hyperbole, ambiguity or emptiness” (148) of the suburban utopia of films like Happiness (Solondz, 1998) and Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) where the doubling of the utopian possibility of deterritorialization is met by the annihiliation of suburban anti-utopianism in a configuration that sequelizes science fiction films such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). The smart film is defined by its blank, doubled ironic address and, for Perkins, the extension and intensification of previous cycles, genres and tendencies in American and world cinema. This is perhaps the book’s most useful contribution to the discourses surrounding modes of independent cinema post-1994, a fairly crowded field, identifying these films not in binary fashion to dominant tendencies or tastes but as adjacent, even sometimes shared, concerns. Although the smart tendency feels too loose to be classified anywhere close to generic (although Perkins doesn’t class it as such), American Smart Cinema argues potently that a set of formal and thematic concerns emerge in the contested space of commercial independent cinema at a particular moment to form a cycle, however limited or qualified that cycle might be. Works Cited Barcelona. Dir. Whit Stillman. Perf. Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman, Tushka Bergen. Barcelona Films/ Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994. Film. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young. Ladd Company Inc./ Warner Bros., 1982. Film. Donnie Darko. Dir. Richard Kelly. Perf. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell. Pandora Cinema/ Flower Films, 2001. Film. Flirt. Dir. Hal Hartley. Perf. Paul Austin, Robert John Burke, Martin Donovan. Neue Deutsche Filmgesellschaft/ Olive Films, 1995. Film. 97

Steven Rawle Happiness. Dir. Todd Solondz. Perf. Jane Adams, Jon Lovitz, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Good Machine/ Killer Films, 1998. Film. The Last Days of Disco. Dir. Whit Stillman. Perf. Chloë Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, Chris Eigeman. Castle Rock Entertainment/ Polygram Filmed Entertainment, 1998. Film. Metropolitan. Dir. Whit Stillman. Perf. Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Chris Eigeman. Allagash Films/ Westerly Film, 1990. Film. Palindromes. Dir. Todd Solondz. Perf. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly. Extra Large Pictures, 2004. Film. Perren, Alisa. Indie Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s. Austin: U. of Texas Press, 2012. Print. The Royal Tenenbaums. Dir. Wes Anderson. Perf. Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston. Touchstone Pictures, 2001. Film. Sconce, Jeffrey. “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film.” Screen 43.4 (2002): 349-69. Print. The Squid and the Whale. Dir. Noah Baumbach. Perf. Owen Kline, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney. Samuel Goldwyn Films/ Sony Pictures International, 2005. Film. Tzioumakis, Yannis. Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and American Independent Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP., 2012. Print. Steven Rawle York St John University, UK

98

Book Reviews Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture. Ed. David W. Marshall (ed). Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Pp/bk 205 pp. ISBN 978-0-7864-2922-6. Price $35.00. Perhaps the most striking thing about David Marshall’s collection of essays on medievalism in popular culture is not necessarily the persuasiveness of its attempts to validate the once nascent sub-discipline of medievalism, but how quickly such studies have taken root over the years since the book’s initial release. In his introduction, the editor rightly identifies an often overlooked but potent dismissal of medievalism according to a perceived high/low cultural divide, according to which “the Middle Ages stands in for high culture, while pop cultural uses of it are positioned as low, and hence unworthy of serious examination on an academic level.”(5) While such opinions may not always be conscious in the minds of many who, having been trained to work with one kind of sources will unwittingly replicate these attitudes in their future efforts, the various essays of the book bring home forcefully the important point that popular culture’s re-use of the medieval period has important lessons to teach us. As Marshall concludes, “the study of pop-cultural medievalism thus becomes a means of locating the ways in which the Middle Ages continue to be used to justify or naturalize socio-political agendas, or at least to desensitize us to them.” (7) What has not changed so much, however, is Marshall’s claim that “the use of medieval images and tropes in popular culture has seen an explosion in recent years” (6) which has not been matched by scholarship across the board. “Outside of film,” he argues, “other popular forms have largely gone unstudied” (5); indeed, a brief glance at recent scholarship on medievalism shows a disproportionate focus on medieval film with works by Finke and Shichtman, Bildhauer, Bernau and Haydock, as well as my own contribution all emerging in the intervening years, while other areas remain either partly or wholly neglected in print. Nevertheless, the proliferation of such works overwhelmingly indicates a general — however reluctant — acceptance of the importance of such popular-cultural artifacts, which suggests that the offhand dismissal of medievalism is by now more of a marginal position than a dominant one In the light of such changes, Mass Market Medieval consequently stands as an important foundational text which extends the study of 99

Andrew B.R. Elliott medievalism from a genealogical base to one that happily takes into account what he calls the “cultural studies approach” (4), which — far from “dumbing down” — carries over the rigorous scholarly approach from medieval studies to medievalism, not least because many of the contributors are themselves medievalists with proven credentials. The excellence of its scholarship (and its scholars) thus allows the book to serve as much as a manifesto for the expansion of critical study of the subject as an important text in its own right. What is equally striking about the collection of 13 essays covered by the book is the impressive range of topics covered, with essays on television and film (Häxan, the BBC’s Canterbury Tales, Blackadder and Groundhog Day) and music (Paul Hardwick’s study of Arthurianism in British Progressive Rock and Trafford and Pluskowski’s excellent chapter on Viking Heavy Metal) alongside studies of less obvious candidates, including Yandell’s essay on medieval prophecy, Earl’s cultural reading of Arthurian tourist sites and Grindley’s provocative but thoughtful chapter on pedagogy. Even studies of medievalist literature, which far more closely reflect traditional textual analysis, adopt noticeably different methodologies: here Walker reads Ellis Peters/Edith Pargeter’s medieval-themed novels as ways of dealing with images of Wales in both past and present; Johnson uses the idea of oppositional ethnography to understand the impact of local memory in The Templar Revelation, suggesting that it creates an alternative history which “turns the ethnographic eye of the West back on itself.” (136) The field of medievalism is further expanded by including two essays on games with medieval themes: the first, by Marshall himself, covers the important role which board games like Dungeons & Dragons play in the interweaving of fantasy with medieval worlds, and Daniel T. Kline’s essay conducts an expert study of the real time strategy game Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, demonstrating that videogames “are teaching tools, and rather than decry them as inconsequential “kid stuff” or sniff at their profligate anachronisms, academics should rather understand video games and account for them in their teaching.” (155) Kline’s conclusions, then, might well speak for the volume as a whole when he suggests that “Rather than demonstrating to me how terribly popular culture gets history “wrong”, these games remind me that even the most extensively researched, closely argued, and academically nuances rendering of the expanse of time we call “the Middle Ages” is, in its own way, simply a different kind of 100

Book Reviews discursive account prone to its own ideological investments and material deficiencies.” (169) Overall, then, as a work with a high scholarly pedigree, but one which is equally open to new approaches, methodologies and subjects for study, Mass Market Medieval remains an essential text for anyone interested not only in the study of the medieval past but, no less importantly, in what we do with that past. Works Cited Bernau, Anke, and Bettina Bildhauer, eds. Medieval Film. Manchester: Manchester UP., 2009. Print. Bildhauer, Bettina. Filming the Middle Ages. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Print. Elliott, Andrew B. R. Remaking the Middle Ages: Images of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. (Publishers), 2011. Print. Finke, Louis A., and Martin B. Schichtman. Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP., 2010. Print. Haydock, Nicholas, and E. L. Risden, eds. Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depiction of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2009. Print. Andrew B.R. Elliott University of Lincoln, UK

101

Richard Berger Unhitched: the Trial of Christopher Hitchens. Richard Seymour. London and New York: Verso, 2012. P/bk 134 pp. ISBN 978-1-84467-990-4. Price $16.95/£9.99. In Unhitched: the Trial of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Seymour puts Hitchens in the dock, where he is accused of having his “noble mind overthrown” (x). Any reader will immediately feel a palpable sense of betrayal in the pages of this short appraisal of what is a huge writing life. In it Seymour casts himself as being of the “true” left, while accusing Hitchens of being some sort of gadfly, thereby chiming with someone else from the “true” left, the British politician George Galloway. Shortly before his death from cancer in 2011, Hitchens was asked how he felt about being called a “self-serving, fat-assed, cynical, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical, contrarian” by former friend Alexander Cockburn. “Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with that”, replied The Hitch, “although he should see my ass now”. In his life he was quite prepared to take the hits, but since he died a host of friends and acquaintances have been quick to protect his legacy. Unhitched then has come in for a lot of criticism. However the central questions still remain: did Hitchens move to the right in his later years, and become an apologist for the “neo-con” architects of the US-led War on Terror? Did his support for “regime change” in Iraq make him an imperialist? Or, did the war offer him a glimpse of what he had always wanted? For Hitchens, allowing women control of their bodies and their reproductive cycle would go a long way in ending poverty in the Third World; it’s there in his attack on Mother Teresa (The Missionary Position, 1995). As the Iraq and Iranian dictatorships were bad news for women, couldn’t Hitchens’ “at any cost” support for the war be viewed as expedient, even necessary? Hitchens had always been in love with the US – he lived in Washington DC for many years, and was married to an American. As he was dying, he would state that one of his regrets was not to see the World Trade Center rebuilt in New York. The difference between right and left in American politics has always been blurred, where even a democrat President can oversee drone attacks and a global spying and intimation complex. Hitchens’s hero, George Orwell, was also someone who was able to describe himself as a socialist, while denouncing “fellow travelers.” So, 102

Book Reviews can we really criticize Hitchens for doing the same? Well, according to Seymour, yes we can! Seymour claims that his book is a critical essay, but he has been very selective in his reading. Also, it is fair to say that Hitchens made his name – in the US at least – in the glare of late-night talk shows and public debates, now found scattered throughout YouTube. Surely more people have “seen” Hitchens’s slaying evangelical Christians such as William Lane Craig than have read God Is Not Great (2007)? His typical brand of putdown – such as suggesting on the death of Jerry Falwell that his corpse be given an enema, so it could be buried in match-box – was perfectly crafted for the social media age. Seymour criticizes Hitchens for not taking one of the two “welltrodden routes” out of the left, but surely that’s a good thing? To say that his move to the right concluded with is assaults on certain Islamic theocracies is too simplistic. Nor does attacking the anti-war left for being too conservative make him one. The Hitchens which emerges from this book then is a singularly unpleasant one: he sympathizes with the working classes, but had little time for the poor; he was a plagiarist and a racist; he was “poor atheist” (54) and a narcissist. Contradictions do start to emerge in Seymour’s account however: he describes Hitchens’s sustained attack on Bill Clinton as “highly personalised” (17) – but Unhitched seems similarly afflicted. Hitchens is criticized for being unsentimental about the War on Terror (“You’re gonna lose a building”) but also for being far too sentimental regarding Desert Storm. Seymour also castigates him for having “no particular dependency on anyone of the left” (xi) and this, in his eyes at least, is the biggest crime of all. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but this book seems mean-spirited at times, which often drowns out some sharp textual analysis. It is right and proper of course to question the political motives of a writer, but to attack him for his position on the Balkan wars in the early 1990s as if he we a policy-maker, rather than a journalist myopic. Hitchens’s friend Martin Amis once bemoaned the reading public’s interest in a writer rather than the writing. While no biography, Unhitched at least does keep to the prodigious output, but its mistake is to view it through the lens of Christopher Hitchens’s last few years. 103

Richard Berger Works Cited Hitchens, Christopher. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Atlantic Books, 2007. Print. -----. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and in Practice. 1995. New York: Atlantic Books, 2012. Print. Richard Berger Bournemouth University, UK

104

Book Reviews How To Be Gay. David M. Halperin. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. H/bk 549 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-06679-3. Price $35.00. It was my first year in Michigan as a graduate student when I heard about David Halperin’s class, “How To Be Gay” that had triggered much dispute among some people, particularly conservatives and rightwing media, who accused Halperin of promoting homosexuality, and recruiting and initiating young straight students. Although I did not have the opportunity to take that class, I am fortunate to see the outcome of it, Halperin’s rigorous book, How To Be Gay, which will no doubt generate much discussion in and out of queer studies, contributing the fields of cultural studies, literature, film, media, and history, among others. In his beautifully written book, Halperin traces American white male gay culture by making a striking distinction between gay as sexual identity and gay as cultural practice. Homosexuality as a psycho-sexual orientation and gayness are two separate categories. In Halperin’s argument, gay is a social practice, a mode of perception, an attitude, or a certain way of (not) doing something rather than a sexual identity which is solely based on same-sex erotic desire. And as a practice, gayness is something one can do well or badly regardless of one’s sexual orientation. For that reason, gayness necessitates being shown how to do it through examples, and how to practice it. Halperin does not describe how to be gay, but what it means to be gay, and induces a conceptual model for analyzing the ways and processes gay culture, as a counter-culture to heteronormative mainstream culture, is formed. Tracing American gay culture from the 1970s onwards, Halperin notes gay men orientate themselves towards gayness by developing dissident strategies of relating to straight cultural objects (movies, songs, clothes, books, works of art) and cultural forms in general (art and architecture, opera and musical theater, pop and disco, style and fashion, emotion and language). In this process, gay men, he argues, are more inclined to appropriate, challenge, reinterpret, and reuse these cultural objects and forms in creating a cultural difference. Queering straight culture is, therefore, a gay practice that shapes gay culture more than cultural artifacts with explicit gayness do. In order to evince how gay men 105

Abdulhamit Arvas appropriate straight culture, Halperin focuses on actress Joan Crawford and one of her scenes in Michael Curtiz’s 1945 movie, Mildred Pierce; and generates his meticulous 500 page close-reading of a line from the movie: “get out before I kill you,” Mildred’s (Crawford’s) ultimate reply to her spoiled daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) who has slappeds her mother seconds agopreviously. Halperin zooms in on the scene, and queries, to uncover gay sensibility and subjectivity: why are gay men so much attached to this moment in the movie? He further posits, the great value of traditional gay male culture, perhaps even more challengingly “resides in some of its most despised and repudiated features: gay male femininity, diva worship, aestheticism, snobbery, drama, adoration of glamour, caricature of women and obsession with the figure of the mother” (38). Many gay men, he argues, embrace heteronormative ways of life nowadays so as to integrate themselves into the larger society, and to prove their essential normality, about which he penetratingly announces “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” (448). Yet, the meaning of gay culture first and foremost signifies awareness about and resistance to a world in which heterosexuality is the norm, he asserts. Heterosexual culture remains as the dominant culture; and in order to survive and flourish in its midst as the different, he candidly propounds, gay men must engage in an appropriation, reinterpretation, perversion of it, which is indeed a strong resistance against it. One who is familiar with Halperin’s earlier work on history of (homo)sexuality may ask if Halperin is doing a history of gay culture. The answer would surely be positive. While he does not provide a clear guide about how to do history of gayness, his book conspicuously performs a micro-history of American gay culture from 1970s to today. Choosing a specific period to concentrate on is apparently a historical strategy, which synchronically demonstrates the peculiarities of a specific context in the formation of gay culture. Yet, can this gay culture be found in previous centuries, one may interrogate? Halperin lubricates his mode of analysis initiates new venues to historically trace and theorizes gay-as-practice in a productive way that might initiate new venues to historically trace the categories examined in all six chapters of the book - male femininity, diva worship, aestheticism, snobbery, drama, adoration of glamour, caricature of women and obsession with the figure of the mother. Halperin’s way of doing things in this book, therefore, invites scholars to trace a genealogy of 106

Book Reviews these categories and many others that are yet to be pursued, and bare the unique queer perceptions in previous eras. Halperin’s demarcation of only an American context as the object of inquiry may raise some eyebrows, considering that gay is a circulating identity category and practice among many other western and westernizing societies. However, his work with scrupulous attention to detail proves that while gay is a term circulating in many non-western societies today, it does not always have the same cultural signification as it does in the American context. While the circulating imageries and discourses within gay communities around the world form a shared gay culture in an age of global interactions and internet, investigating the historical formations of sexual identities and culture in a given society will doubtlessly reveal a different dimension of the gay culture within that space. The way Halperin is very careful not to make an assertion about non-American societies, therefore, functions to urge the readers to peruse different cultural contexts and highlight the formation and features of a queer culture, which appropriates and reinterprets the heteronormative forms and norms, in that context. In so doing, Halperin’s How To Be Gay, I believe, insinuates further inquiries for those who desire to ponder over gay culture in transcultural contexts: How to Be Gay in Turkey? In France? In New Zealand? In India? In South Africa? Or elsewhere? Works Cited Mildred Pierce. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Perf. Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Zachary Scott. Warner Bros., 1945. Film. Abdulhamit Arvas Michigan State University

107

Danielle Verena Kollig My Culture, My Color, My Self: Heritage, Resilience, and Community in the Lives of Young Adults. Toby S. Jenkins. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. P/bk 191 pp. ISBN 978-1-4399-0830-3. Price $ 24.95. In My Culture, My Color, My Self, Toby S. Jenkins grants a voice to students at schools, colleges, and universities that, so one of her theses, do not find sufficient representation within US mainstream culture, and thus within current school and college curricula. In this volume, she primarily addresses the cultural backgrounds of students of color, mostly of African American origins, since “[t]he question ‘Who am I’ for the African American is a hard one; in many ways, we are on the outskirts of both societies – African and American – that we claim in our name.” (5) Her book is a highly elaborate scholarly and artistic call to rethink our understandings of culture in the United States that we teach our students. She requires action: from educators, student peers and administrators from all ethnic groups and identities within current society. In her promotion of student centeredness as a teaching and pedagogical philosophy “in which we make students central to everything that we do,” (152) Jenkins requires educators and administrators to listen to what US students of all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, especially those often perceived as the “ethnic other,” have to say about what culture and values mean to them. Cultural studies today, Jenkins argues with reference to authors and scholars like Carter G. Woodson, Maulana Karenga, or bell hooks, must pursue the tasks in whose service she puts her own book: “in order for African Americans to truly develop agency for positive, loving, and progressive cultural development, the act of decolonizing one’s mind must occur.” (20) These “decolonization” efforts become evident through the book’s structure. The book’s content prominently features students’ cultural self-portraits and interviews that the author conducts in one-onone interactions, during in-class situations, and student group meetings. After a student’s self-portrait and a “cultural snapshot” that Jenkins draws from students she has interacted with during meetings and conversations, she underlines their statements, poems as well as learned and self-drafted song lyrics with scholarly literature and research that address the impact of lived culture for the human being’s benevolence. Moreover, Jenkins redefines the notion of cultural capital that is not only drawn from 108

Book Reviews museums, concert halls, and expensive theater settings but from daily interactions. In order to account for a more inclusive notion of culture that pays homage to the diverse population (not only) of today’s America, Jenkins sees cultural capital as an agglomeration of “beliefs, values, rituals, norms, and experiences” (26) that mark the students’ everyday lives. Culture, so Jenkins, reflects in the customs and traditions of their families and peer groups (chapter 1), through family bonds that go beyond the traditional idea of a core-family and include extended relatives and close friends (chapter 2). Thus, the role of culture is to provide self-value and confidence to students that have difficulties to make their voice heard. Jenkins steps back and lets her participants speak for themselves. The reader learns how “Mimi” (all names mentioned are pseudonyms) escaped poverty and persecution in her home country Vietnam and found a new life in California (chapter 6), how “Francheska Marie SotoGonzales” travels back and forth between her native island Puerto Rico and her current residency Virginia (chapter 5) and keeps close contact with her grandmother’s family, their customs and beliefs. And we learn how students whose families sacrificed a lot for the benefit of their children feel responsible to become cultural leaders, albeit not necessarily in the sense of economic power. In reference to the portraiture the NFL football player “Derrick” draws of himself, cultural leadership that Jenkins learns about and advocates implies immersion in “the usefulness and positivity of popular forms of local culture” (108) such as hip-hop culture, graffiti arts, spoken word performances, or sports, religious rituals, and family meals. Jenkins introduces students’ narratives about family Thanksgiving convocations, citations of poems like Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” (chapter 2), or pieces of spoken word art (chapter 6). They all underline the scholar’s appeal to rethink traditional approaches to college education (chapter 7): “When was the last time that you faced your professional faults head-on as did these brave students?” (158) Despite her empathy and enthusiasm for her student participants, their friends and families, Jenkins is not immune to the shortcomings of several members of her research pool. Stories of drug abuse, parental neglect, and most of all the absence of a father-figure occur throughout the chapters. Jenkins’s collected stories and cultural snapshots do not seek for excuses. Rather, negative experiences like these are encouraged to be seen as challenges to improve the situation for marginalized ethnic communities 109

Danielle Verena Kollig – both by educators and students. Not only is it necessary to recognize students of color’s cultural interests and biographies and include them into college and school environments. Jenkins also encourages educators and administrators to “invite family members to facilitate workshops, serve as panelists and lecture on campus – and not just the potential donors.” (154) My Culture, My Color, My Self thus follows a new path towards a diverse scholarship that does not end with the class’s session. An education that Jenkins envisions wants to replace the discussions about underrepresented populations not simply by talking about them. It wants more: it wants us to listen and learn from them and therewith from the cultural leaders of tomorrow. Works Cited Angelou, Maya. “Phenomenal Woman.” Poemhunter.com, Apr. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. Danielle Verena Kollig Independent Scholar

110

Book Reviews The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. Tessa Roynon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. P/bk 143 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-177221. Price £19.99. Toni Morrison enjoys a rare popularity for an author whose works present obvious challenges to her readers. Her treatment of historically unspoken and unspeakable subjects and her ambiguous messages have nurtured a wide critical interest, which makes approaching her oeuvre an act of defiance. It is from this point, “to provide one way into and one path through that world,” that Tessa Roynon says she has set out to write her Introduction to Toni Morrison (ix). There is, however, more to the book than this modest aim, for it covers a large territory. In the first two chapters, it offers a full portrait of Toni Morrison by providing a short but insightful glimpse into her life and by introducing each of her works, fiction and non-fiction (with the exception of her last book Home, which came out when the Introduction was being published) in analyzes that are interwoven with Morrison’s material sources, influences, literary tropes, stylistic innovations and political arguments. In addition, the last two chapters, entitled, “Contexts” and “Reception” respectively, highlight the historical, social and cultural contexts for each work and provide an overview of Morrison’s reputation both in the US and in Europe. The biographical information on Morrison in the book not only helps envision the richness and variety of her experience but also, as Roynon notes in the chapter entitled “Contexts,” to put her in perspective so that “we remember that ‘Toni Morrison’ was not always a house-hold name, and that black writing was not always in vogue” (100). Such a perspective reminds the contemporary reader that what can be the taken -for -granted topics and discussions especially in matters of race and gender today was at the time of Morrison’s treatment of them were highly challenging and radical, which, in turn, does justice to and sheds light on the innovations in her fiction. Roynon’s Morrison has surprises for readers who know her only through her novels and critical writing. Morrison’s less known engagements, such as books for children, lyrics and libretto writing, curatorship in the Louvre Museum and the Baryshnikov Arts Center are among some that the introduction describes. Along with Morrison’s well-known fiction and non-fiction, Roynon discusses each of these works, albeit, as would be expected, in less detail. 111

Nilsen Gökçen In addition to the range of her creativity, Morrison in Roynon’s book is presented with qualities that have hitherto been unnoticed. In the midst of the serious topics that Toni Morrison handles, Tessa Roynon detects a strong and deep note of humor and wit (15). Although Roynon does not particularly point at the humorous and witty moments in Morrison’s writing, her use of irony and parody along with her subversive strategy of employing genres that mock epic, romance and pastoral could probably exemplify Morrison’s humor (63). In discussing Morrison’s fiction, Roynon pays particular attention to the ways in which Toni Morrison’s personal history coincides both with the particular moments she portrays and the present moment she speaks to. In her discussion of Beloved, for example, not only does she look into slavery, and the ensuing Civil War and the Reconstruction, but also Morrison’s personal ethical interest in slave narratives and the ways she came across Margaret Garner’s story, as well as the meanings the novel may hold for the 1980s in which it was published. Roynon thus achieves multilayered analyses uncommon in most introductions. In her discussions of each of Morrison’s oeuvre, Roynon’s keen observations help highlight a wide array of sources, ur-texts, subtexts, and traditions, ranging from African folklore to African American cultural innovations such as jazz and blues, from the Bible to Ancient Greek and Roman literature, and from European literature, especially novel to American national myths. Roynon’s book is particularly interesting and commendable as she manages to detect such intertextual ties among Morrison’s autobiographical references, prefaces and critical writings, some of which are well-known, such as Margaret Garner’s story for Beloved, but some are fresh and original such as the one between jazz and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As such, Roynon reads Morrison’s works both in continuity withas a continuation of the African American writers before her and as a response to a wide range of writing, white, black, American and European. This, she notes, is one of the many ways in which Morrison brings together the binary oppositions of white and black, past and present, and personal and political. One of the most noteworthy arguments in the introduction is Toni Morrison’s search for home. This topic is particularly poignant coming from a descendant of uprooted slaves, whose slave characters and their descendants 112

Book Reviews crowd her books. But Roynon extends the home metaphor to signify the language that Morrison carves for herself and for her characters. Morrison’s dense and innovative usage of language then gains a whole new significance. Tessa Roynon’s reading of Morrison’s oeuvre makes clear that in dealing with her writing, the readers haves to learn to live with multiplicities of meaning and complexities of moral choices. She underlines the author’s presentation of characters without moral judgment, which often serves to problematize issues and does not allow the reader to rest easy in the comfort and triviality of binaries of good and evil. Such a reading does full justice to a complex writer like Toni Morrison, who considers it her moral obligation to demonstrate the motives behind the acts of her characters, thus precluding any final judgment. The chapter that discusses the contexts behind Morrison’s life and career provides encapsulated information on the historical events and their cultural milieucontexts. They are particularly useful in directing the attention of the reader to vital points, which s/he could easily miss. The final chapter introduces the critical reception of Morrison, which has been improved greatly with the publication of Beloved both inside the US and in Europe. This chapter is most interesting as it shows the effects of Morrison’s reception of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes among the literary circles worldwide. Roynon’s book as a whole fulfills its promise to provide a pathway for the reader to Morrison’s life and work and their interplay with history. Especially students of American literature with intentions of publishing on Toni Morrison will find her introductions and suggestions highly useful and worth their time. Works Cited Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Ware, UK: Wordsworth Classics, 1992. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print. -----. Home. New York: Vintage, 2012. Print. Nilsen Gökçen Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir 113

Barry A. Hudek Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces. Andrew Keller Estes. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 2013. P/bk 239 pp. ISBN 978-90-420-3629-1. Price $68.00. Writing within Rodopi’s Spatial Practices series Estes convincingly argues that Cormac McCarthy’s fiction can be seen in light of two primary modes of thinking about American wilderness: either as overwhelmingly positive or negative views by both religious and ethical perspectives. Charting the history of American wilderness writing from the Puritans to the postmodernists, Estes illustrates how McCarthy’s novels change over time and how they “derive their structure from two competing views of the land, something as essentially good or essentially evil” (15). According to Estes, McCarthy fictionalizes and criticizes both of these views offering an alternative to such binaries as to “hint at a new way forward, an escape from traditional ways of conceiving space” while offering a “better approach to environment” (16). Placing McCarthy in the context of environmental thinkers such as the Puritans, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Jackson Turner, Leo Marx, Laurence Buell and others, Estes provides a close reading of most of McCarthy’s major fiction tracing the characters’ relationship to and their ideas about American landscapes. McCarthy’s characters usually illustrate some manifestation of the American viewpoint of the binary between the good and evil nature. Culminating with McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road (2008) Estes shows how McCarthy’s characters either fail to find such positivity, or wreak havoc on the land based on a negative view of nature. Estes also traces McCarthy’s earlier fiction arguing that these novels illustrate McCarthy’s critique of the Turner Thesis and how American writers have created their own ideas about wilderness in American spaces. Characters in Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing, according to Estes, rely on faulty notions of created nature. Theses novels present people who (faultily) view the land as places to create themselves and project their viewpoints into wild nature. In McCarthy’s later fictions, No Country for Old Men and The Road are places where McCarthy explores the negative side of the American wilderness dichotomy. For McCarthy, the negative slant is troubling because it leads to wanton destruction of nature, mostly 114

Book Reviews at the hands of corporations, since a blatant disregard of nature’s rights can be overlooked given wild nature is viewed in negative ways, as a place to “civilize.” Estes’s work is strongest in its close reading, and his close reading of The Road is the strongest amongst the novels analyzed. Here, Estes says, McCarthy provides a way out of the either/or thinking offering a better approach to American environment. In The Road, the two un-named main characters, a father and son, attempt to chart a post-apocalyptic United States by using an old oil company map. This map contains familiar landscapes such as roads, state lines and historical landmarks all of which have been rendered unfamiliar by the unnamed apocalypse. For Estes, this is tantamount to an anthropomorphic view of nature, thus obsolete in the wake of tragedy. This map is contrasted with what Estes calls the “biocentric” maps that can be seen in some of McCarthy’s fiction, the most notable being a “map” inscribed upon a fish in The Road. According to Estes, these maps represent McCarthy’s environmental position, neither entirely positive nor entirely negative. He writes that the “biocentric” map “does not represent nature as something only to be minded and exploited [like the anthropomorphic maps] but rather as something with its own rights” whereas the anthropomorphic maps show “failed writings of American spaces” (102). These “biocentric maps” are important in McCarthy’s fiction because they “present a sort of resolution in that they emphasize nature’s dynamism and the interconnectedness of all parts of the biosphere” which offers an alternative to the extreme positive / negative point-of-view characteristic of American nature writing. Estes’s argument is interesting to both McCarthy scholars and eco-critics since it offers a new appraisal of McCarthy’s oeuvre while simultaneously offering a new way of thinking about American environmental spaces. Do note that be it the writer’s preference, or the press itself, the book is laden with “set-up language” (“In this chapter I am going to argue”; “I will then argue”; “I have previously argued”, etc.) Estes’s argument and textual analysis is nevertheless convincing, clear and insightful; he succeeds in what he sets out to argue. Estes also reminds readers how arguments about space, place and environment are socially constructed. He argues, “The Border Trilogy, in putting forth opposing views on space and place, leads readers to a reconsideration of how landscapes are textually mediated” where “it is the role we as readers and writers have 115

Barry A. Hudek in constructing space” (219). Estes’s work challenges deeply help beliefs about American wilderness, challenging the binary outlook so long held in American studies. Works Cited McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print. -----. Blood Meridian. New York: Random House, 1985. Print. -----. The Crossing. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print. -----. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print. -----. The Road. London: Picador, 2008. Print. Barry A. Hudek University of Mississippi

116

Book Reviews Fifty Years in Constantinople and Recollections of Robert College. George Washburn. 1909. İstanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2012. P/bk xxiii + 273 pp. ISBN 978-60504238-68-2. Price TL 20. It is impossible, at least for me, to read a volume such as George Washburn’s largely autobiographical account of Robert College during the later nineteenth century, and escape the tug of the past. I have never visited the College — although I have sailed past it during excursions up and down the Bosphorus. Nevertheless, I long ago attended a somewhat similar school. Washburn’s institution was founded in 1863 to educate undergraduate students in Turkey “without distinction of race or religion” (14). My own school — Wasatch Academy, in Mt. Pleasant, Utah — was founded in 1875 to educate children and younger adults; today it operates as a co-educational, four-year, college-preparatory high school. In spite of their many differences, the two schools are similar in several important ways. First, they both began as missionary endeavors. Although Christopher Robert, the school’s eponymous founder, was a philanthropist, co-founder Cyrus Hamlin was a Presbyterian missionary. Wasatch too was founded by a Presbyterian named Duncan McMillan, and until the early 1970s it was supported by that denomination’s National Board of Missions. Furthermore, both schools are venerable: Robert is the oldest American school still operating outside the boundaries of the United States, and Wasatch is the oldest boarding school of its kind in the Intermountain West. Certain details of everyday, nineteenth-century life at Robert also recall my own 1960s schooldays. Courses at Wasatch were necessarily more restricted; we had no instruction in rhetoric or parliamentary law or the history of philosophy, as Robert students did as early as 1874-1875 (85). But we did have our own problems with students who spoke only a little English (one boy in my first-year dorm was a Paiute speaker), and we shared meals and went through commencement exercises similar to those experienced by early generations of Robert students. Nor was Wasatch a much smaller school. In 1965, my graduating class numbered 51 and the entire school enrolled about 175 boarders and a handful of day students. In 1874-1875, Robert enrolled 144 boarders and as many as 176 day students at the end of that academic year (80-81). By 1890-1892, however, Robert’s 117

Michael Saffle enrollment had shrunk to 194, “of whom 130 were boarders” (187). Of course there were differences too, profound as well as trivial. We had no cricket matches at Wasatch, nor do they have them today. We had nothing to do with Bulgarian rebels and no Russo-Turkish War to contend with. Much of Washburn’s narrative is filled with the political problems that Turkey and her neighbors experienced as a nation and an empire prior to 1907, when his story ends (133). Many of these problems were observed by him at first hand; in 1879, for example, the constitutional assembly that convened in Tirnova passed “a resolution of gratitude to Dr. Long [a.k.a. Professor Albert L. Long, preacher and sometime acting director of Robert] and myself for what we had done for the elevation and independence of Bulgaria” (128). For some readers these observations may be the only reason to consult Washburn’s work. For others it may be the school’s own history, described at some length in terms of classes, instructors, salaries, vacancies, vacations, and — perhaps most important — endowments. It was the arrival of “Mr. and Mrs. John S. Kennedy” in 1888, and especially the help they offered Robert, that sustained Washburn’s own “faith in the College as really God’s work and not ours” (169). For me, as a sometime visitor to İstanbul (no one calls it “Constantinople” today) and an enthusiast when it comes to that city’s cuisine, hospitality, and climate, it is the little things that make Washburn’s account of fifty years at an American school in Turkey worth reading. The difficulties of daily life, described from by an active, lively, but irrevocably “foreign” resident of a fascinating nation. Turkey’s war with Greece during 1896-1897 and the “Great Constantinople Massacre” (actually a series of massacres) during 1895-1896 are addressed at some length, but the 1880 murder of an Armenian steward — killed “by two hired assassins at midday” and “within a stone’s throw of the College” (134) is more vigorously described. For Washburn, international and even national history takes a back seat to institutional and local history in a unusual, almost entirely expatriate sense. One problem with the volume as it stands is the lack of a new introduction; the one printed between pages xv-xxvii is Washburn’s own. Washburn is always informative, but one would like to know more of Robert College and gain perspectives on its history from a second expert’s perspective. Another problem is the index, which is limited mostly to 118

Book Reviews the names of individuals and which — although it includes “cricket,” “earthquakes,” and “Gymnasium” among its scattered subject entries — omits the Massacre altogether. More telling is the absence of an entry for “America”: a nation that, as a nation, is mentioned only in passing. This is a volume Americanists may wish mostly to read between its lines. Among other things it serves as an alternative to The Turk and His Lost Provinces, William Eleroy Curtis’s more or less contemporaneous, anti-Turkish rant of 1903. And, of course, it provides information unavailable anywhere else — at least prior to 1909, when it appeared for the first time in print. Works Cited Curtis, William Eleroy. The Turk and his Lost Provinces: Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia. 1903. Archive.org., 2007. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Michael Saffle Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

119

Feryal Çubukçu American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture 1830-1989. Eds. Nur Bilge Criss, Selçuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood and Louis Mazzari. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. H/bk 412 pp. ISBN 978-1-4438-3205-7. Price £49.99. American Turkish Encounters comprises a selection of 23 chapters subsumed under 4 headings: the Historical Stage, the Interwar Years, the Cold War, and Cultural and Intellectual Interaction. The book provides an engaging and timely overview of Turkish-American interactions starting with the 1830s and reaching the 1980s, and brings a collection of articles as comprehensive, judicious and up-to-the-minute as anyone could wish for. It promises to be an indispensable guide to historians, sociologists, and anybody in the field of cultural studies and American Literature. Since scholarship is very limited on Turkish-American interactions, this book is thoroughly fruitful for those interested in the political, social, cultural and intellectual dimensions of these two countries. This book consists of papers that were solicited from young Turkish and American scholars who joined a conference in İstanbul in June 2006. The resulting studies are grouped chronologically in the 19th century, 1918-1939, 1939-1989 and the aftermath. The book portrays a rich array of topics ranging from the politics of war to the culture of jazz and business, and introduces supporting evidence both from Turkish and American archives. The volume starts with the little-known elements of the late Ottoman period, bringing to light the religious and intellectual background of the early missionary movement, implying the long lasting impact of the missionaries forming the survival of the “trustworthy” image of Americans as educators and healers. The third chapter is concerned with Robert College and its history and establishment providing an insight into academia. While the fifth chapter and its author, Muammer Gül asserts that the 19th century encounters yield a wealth of fairy-like stories and poems, Ahmad’s and Kuneralp’s articles significantly contribute to the detailed research on the activities of early diplomats from the USA. The second part, the Interwar Years, starts with the history of the American Embassy in Beyoğlu by Mazzari and tackles the American diplomacy and how it paid attention to the incorporation of Hatay into 120

Book Reviews the Turkish Republic showing the “American desire for international stability” in Shields’s article (146). The third part, on the Cold War years is extremely engaging and illuminating to see how the Marshall Plan was actively implemented in Turkey and what the plan was behind it. Kozat’s looks at what the US thought of Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s. Criss’s chapter examines what the US thought of “ the authoritarianism and national security policies of repression in Turkey”, calling the years 1960s and 1970s as “the fall-out in relations” after the 1980 military coup as successful as the “new global situation brought the two nations together.” (297) The fourth part is stimulating for the cultural theorist as the articles highlight how American models have been transferred and applied in business and public administration, how the jazz impacted the society, how American life is depicted in Turkish plays, how American Aid is represented and published in humorous magazines and how the life of the comedian Howard Reed reflects Turkish-American history. In short, this volume highlights the US impact on diplomacy, education, business, literature, medicine and political strategies in Turkey. American Turkish Encounters takes an intriguing and provocative stance, substantiates the arguments in each chapter with very striking examples to prove how deep an impact the US has had on Turkey, never failing to demonstrate that the encounters between the US and Turkey have always been remarkable and their relationship will go on flourishing. Feryal Çubukçu Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir

121

Marcie J. Patton Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey. Eds. Ayşe Kadıoğlu and E. Fuat Keyman. Salt Lake City, Utah: U. of Utah Press, 2012. P/bk 376 pp. ISBN 978-1-60781-031-5. Price $40.00. Understanding the phenomenon of nationalism has been a preoccupation of scholars for more than two centuries. This edited volume, focused on Turkey, is a welcome addition to this literature. Its two overarching themes are first that nationalism should be viewed as plural and heterogeneous in character, and second that nationalisms do not remain static but are subject to various kinds of dynamic encounters including osmosis, friction, cross-breeding, and playing one off one against the other. The book is divided into three parts beginning in Section One with tracing Turkish nationalism from its historical origins to contemporary nationalist discourses. Co-author Keyman (Chapter 2) explains that the persistence of nationalism in Turkey across all historical periods is embedded in the country’s top-down, modernizing statist tradition which derived from a desire for security (secure the state’s existence) and modernity (build modern Turkey by copying the Western model of civilization). How these twin motives of Turkish nationalism, preservation of the state and Westernism, which are at the core of national identity in Turkey figured in the discourse of two Young Turk intellectuals in the pre-republic years, and how present day Turkish nationalism has become increasingly security-oriented and militaristic in terms of in terms of government policies is addressed by co-author Kadıoğlu (Chapter 3). Bora (Chapter 4) develops a family tree of nationalist discourses in Turkey that branch out from one common source, the “root language” of official nationalism (also referred to as Atatürk’s or Kemalist nationalism with its aim to build and preserve the Turkish nation-state) to various discursive dialects (left-wing Kemalist nationalism, liberal neo-nationalism, racist-ethnicist pan-Turkish nationalism, and Islamism in nationalism). A good companion to Bora’s thought-provoking chapter is Özkırımlı’s (Chapter 5) which attempts to build on Bora’s schema and offers a topography of contemporary Turkish nationalisms that situates Turkish political parties vis-à-vis one another in terms of the competing discourses they articulate as they participate in an on-going Gramscian struggle for a hegemonic position. Section Two and Three explore two critical variants of Turkish nationalism, conservative-religious nationalism and Kurdish nationalism 122

Book Reviews respectively. Uzer (Chapter 6) traces the evolution of the conservative variants of Turkish nationalism from territorial-civic to ethnic to the Turkish-Islamist synthesis. Koyuncu-Lorasdağı (Chapter 7) analyzes the relation between Islam and nationalism and skillfully makes the case that although Islam is indispensable to nationalism in Turkey, it has been incorporated instrumentally to stir national pride and forge group solidarity, rather than to assert religio-political aspirations. Coşar (Chapter 8) deepens this argument showing that Muslimhood (a domesticated Islamic political identity discernible in the Turkish-Islamist synthesis) has been a dominant strand in post-1980 nationalism and that three political parties on the right (the BBP, MHP, and AKP) have strategically employed this discourse to survive in national politics. Section Three investigates Kurdish nationalism. In his genealogy of Kurdish nationalism Özoğulu (Chapter 9) argues that Kurdish nationalism was constructed following the First World War as opposed to being organically linked to the past. Yeğen (Chapter 10) delves into the discourse of extreme right-wing, left-wing, and mainstream Turkish nationalisms in terms of their perceptions of the Kurdish question. Somer (Chapter 11) offers an intriguing counterfactual argument that the Kurdish question could have been settled if secular and religious elites could have resolved their differences over the “clashing values of secularism.” Lastly Eccarius-Kelly (Chapter 12) introduces the voices of Diaspora Kurds in Europe noting that despite the difficulties of organizing due to the involvement of radical, PKK-affiliated Kurdish activists, the lengthening span of generations of Kurds now living there is leading to a de-emphasis of aspirations for a Kurdish state (territorial nationalism) and a growing preference for preservation of Kurdish heritage and historical memory (cultural nationalism). The editors have produced a work that will certainly fill a void in the literature, but it should be mentioned that it is not easily accessible to the non-academic reader. Some chapters are heavy on jargon and obtuse in explication. On a lesser note the title is confusing. In a symbiotic relationship the association between two organisms may be either advantageous to one or both, or harmful to one; however, there is no element of competition. Antagonisms imply hostility, not mutual need. Minor quibbling aside, this volume is rich in insights and intricate details about the discursive origin, evolution, and hybridizations of the multiple nationalisms at play in 123

Turkey, both historically and today. It is aimed at specialists in the politics and history of Turkey, and will also be of interest to serious students of nationalism. Marcie J. Patton Fairfield University

124

Book Reviews From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey. Behlül Özkan. New Haven: Yale UP., 2012. P/bk 272 pp. ISBN: 978-0300172010. Price $35.00. Özkan traces the evolution of Turkish nationalism from the late Ottoman period to the present with particular reference to the notion of vatan (homeland). This revisionist project problematizes both the territorial concept of nations put forth by Weber, and what Özkan terms the “official account” of Turkish history, focusing on shifting political, educational, and journalistic discourses regarding vatan to reveal the social construction of the concept. Engaging literature from the fields of nationalism studies (Anderson and Gellner), Turkish history (e.g. Hanioğlü, Kafadar, Karpat, and Lewis), and geography (Gearóid Ó Tuathail, David Campbell, and Anssi Paasi), Özkan delves into a wealth of primary sources, including diplomatic correspondence, speeches, textbooks, maps, fiction, and poetry to explain how the broad Ottoman-era notion of an “abode of Islam” became a territorially delimited Turkish nationalism. Özkan begins with the issue of Ottoman military defeats, noting that the Treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Küçük Kaynarca (1774) signaled an end to the expansion of the abode of Islam and called into question traditional Ottoman cosmology. The work of geographers such as Katip Çelebi, which was influenced by Western sources and methods, provided a partial answer to the question of what kinds of knowledge the Ottomans would need to compete in the shifting world. Elites often looked to Europe when trying to decide how to reform the Empire, and the French Revolution was a particularly important influence. For Özkan, the latter can be seen in the Tanzimat reforms (1839), as the adoption of heraldry, an anthem, and medals were all an attempt to formulate a popular notion of Ottoman patrie or vatan. The Young Ottoman Namık Kemal was among the most important thinkers on the latter concept, transforming “the meaning of vatan from a feeling of belonging to a birthplace into a feeling of loyalty toward a sacred territory” (39). Özkan notes that the Young Turks, the next generation of reformers, were faced with three competing, expansionist ideologies which might be employed to unite the faltering Empire: Ottomanism, Islamism, and panTurkism. Many of the original members of the Committee of Union and 125

Josh Carney Progress (CUP), the organizing body of the Young Turks, were not Turkish themselves, and there was thus little impetus behind the pan-Turkish ideology. But the Balkan wars marked a turning point. Key thinkers such as Yusuf Akçura and Ziya Gökalp began to support pan-Turkism and the CUP adopted nationalism with its shift from association to political party in the wake of the 1913 coup. With the onset of World War I, both Islamist and pan-Turkic rhetoric were employed to appeal to denizens of the Empire, but the Hashemite Revolt spelled a temporary end to the Islamist rhetoric. Post-war, Mustafa Kemal’s National Pact focused on the “geographical unity” of the emerging nation, and during the early Turkish War of Independence, Islamist rhetoric was used to unite various Muslims of Anatolia against the Greeks. It was only after the Second İnönü battle of 1921 that Turkishness became a focus. Ultimately, none of the three original ideologies were adopted; it was, rather, a very territorially contained Turkish nationalism that emerged from the War of Independence. Alongside the rhetoric of military and state, Özkan notes that geography and particularly geographical education play a powerful role in the process of imagining a national identity. Educational materials and maps in the Empire prior to 1908 were devoid of patriotic appeals and tended to elide the Empire’s losses. With the rise of the Young Turks, however, this shifted radically, as geography education became a focal point for instilling loyalty. After 1912, the motif of revenge for lost territory became pronounced as well. The presence of minorities in educational materials underwent a number of shifts: up until 1919 it was noted objectively; after the Republic was founded it was noted, but sometimes with derogatory terms or sometimes with a clarification that all Muslim minorities had been “Turkified”; after 1930, non-Turkish groups were not even mentioned. Maps had a powerful role in awakening a nationalist consciousness and after the Independence War the comparison of the Sèvres and Lauussane maps became important in establishing the narrative of Mustafa Kemal as savior of the nation. Özkan notes that geography education between 1950 and 1980 emphasized Turkey’s ties with the West, particularly its role in NATO. After the 1980 military coup, geography education focused almost exclusively on a militarist perspective, emphasizing threats along the borders, “internal enemies,” and the presence of Turkic peoples throughout the world. There has been some shift away from the latter perspective since the millennium, with a tendency to emphasize Turkey’s role in the global system. 126

Book Reviews Özkan identifies foreign policy discourse as particularly hegemonic in the creation of national identity, both because it feeds on convincing arguments of geographical determinism and because it plays on the notion of existential danger to the country and the people. He examines three distinct discourse trends that have emerged since the founding of the Turkish Republic. The first period encompassed the rule of Atatürk, from 1923-1939, and was characterized by anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist rhetoric. Fears of fascist Italy, which occupied the Dodecanese Islands, were high at this time, and relations with the Soviet Union were pragmatically cordial, though Turkey avoided any kind of ideological alignment. After Atatürk’s death, İnönü took power, ushering in a period of anti-communist rhetoric that Özkan compares to the McCarthy era of the US. Turkey’s nonalignment during World War II put İnönü in a somewhat weak position, and he used the largely exaggerated Soviet “threat” to Kars and Ardahan in 1945 to begin an anti-communist campaign against critics. Though this worked temporarily, members of the Democrat Party quickly learned to use the same rhetoric, even trumping İnönü in a sense when they joined the Korean War as a means of gaining NATO entry. This anti-communist period lasted until the end of the Cold War, and has been followed by moves toward EU integration. For Özkan, the best example of this shift is seen in the approach to Cyprus. Though the island has been a source of strong nationalist sentiment epitomized by the term “baby vatan” since the 1950s, a coalition of businesspeople, liberal politicians, civil society organizations and, eventually, the Justice and Development Party (AKParty), favored EU integration, and were willing to back the 2004 Annan Plan, which involved concessions over Cyprus, in order to secure Turkey’s EU accession bid. Özkan concludes by reiterating that the notion of vatan emerging since the late Ottoman period has been continually de- and re-territorialized. While Turkey’s current understanding of vatan is in a state of flux since the end of the Cold War, he notes that one thing is clear: “neither the Turkish nor any other state have a monopoly over its territory in the Weberian sense” (214). Özkan’s account is a compelling read, as it is both well-written and presents interesting and thoughtful arguments for a counter-understanding of some of the key developments in Turkish nationalism. The text contains meticulous endnotes offering thorough documentation of sources 127

Josh Carney and useful expansions on his primary text. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography, and this is lamentable given the wealth of sources that Özkan draws upon. This is primarily a study of discourse, and a selective one at that. From a historical perspective, there are some obvious omissions, the most glaring of which is any mention of the mass-killing of Armenians in 1915, a situation which clearly was and remains deeply imbricated with conceptions of Turkish nationalism. Though Özkan mentions Laclau and Foucault, he does not articulate a particular theory of discourse, nor does he problematize his use of sources. This leads to a presentation of a particular counter-history that, while refreshing in its straightforward approach, might also be considered under-theorized. For those interested in the history of the Turkish Republic, this is a key text that invites us to re-think much of what we’ve learned about its nationalist trends. Josh Carney Indiana University

128

Book Reviews Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life. Gündüz Vassaf. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2011. P/bk 275 pp. ISBN 978-975-050962-9. Price TL 21.50. Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life is based on Gündüz Vassaf’s opinions about the everyday life in terms of what we individuals internalize as norms and how this shapes our daily acts. Through an alternative reading of the established understanding of freedom, Vassaf articulates his views on the everyday forms of totalitarianism by pointing to our agency in the creation and continuation of such an order. The title of the book refers to Vassaf’s main argument about freedom. Accordingly, we take for granted whatever is presented to us in the form of norms without questioning, and this quick internalization deprives us of freedom. The absence of critical thinking, the fear of freedom and total subservience to what is established by others lead to our imprisonment in our daily lives (13). Therefore, throughout the book, Vassaf intends to urge readers into critical thinking by asking questions. However, Vassaf’s concern is not to give any answers to the questions he raises. On the contrary, he deliberately refrains from reaching clear-cut solutions because solutions can only lead to other forms of totalitarianism. (14) In each chapter, Vassaf discusses totalitarianism through a series of binary oppositions such as day/night, heaven/hell, life/death, young/old, sanity/madness, speech/silence, agreement/disagreement, heroes/traitors. By interpreting words and referring to their fixed meanings, Vassaf draws attention to how societies or cultures attribute a meaning to each word than it might actually contain and how the first part of the binary pairs is deemed more significant at the expense of the second part and thus freedom. Vassaf’s points are intended to disclose that these meanings are not inherent but artificially imposed by the order that we do not question. In all of his discussions, Vassaf subverts conventional perceptions by taking the opposite approach and praising the second part of the binaries which are avoided and overlooked. As the authority-figures such as doctors, parents, teachers, leaders, heroes all take part in our socialization and adaptation process through hospitals, family, school and political parties, respectively. Therefore, all such institutions are totalitarian by nature and serve to the purpose of standardization of the individual and 129

Aysun Kıran homogenization of society. For example, they condition us to associate darkness with the forces of evil and avoid the night. (19) We are inclined to dream of going to the heaven or creating thean image of heaven on earth. (30) Staying young and forgetting death are glorified, whereas people and places evoking death and disease are ignored and placed out of sight. Thus, heaven or life itself becomes a totalitarian concept because it is abstracted from its opposite opposite idea. (31) In a similar vein, according to Vassaf, we are accustomed to fearing from silence and taking for granted that speech is necessarily equivalent to freedom. However, we do not consider that words bring an order, a standardization to the world of objects and feelings by reducing a multi-dimensional, multi-sensual experiences to one spoken word. (43) “Freedom of choice” as a phrase obscures the fact that choosing only from a selected number of options is not essentially liberating but restraining. In parallel, we are taught to agree rather than disagree to guarantee “false security” in the family, at school, in religion or government. (171) We are expected to adopt what is deemed to be acceptable in order to be happy and free. Within this framework, Vassaf argues that such delusion of freedom results in possession, power and control, which in return reinforces the totalitarian order bereft of freedom itself. In other words, any attempt to define, categorize or standardize a concept is a violation of the concept according to the author. Once defined, intelligence becomes dull, beauty uninspiring, love is consumed, justice needs justification and freedom simply ceases to exist outside of its defined form. (122) Even though Vassaf’s observations belong to a period before the fall of the Berlin Wall falls and the dissolution of the Soviet Union dissolves, the book retains its significance. Particularly the chapters “‘Informania”’ and “‘Zap! You’re Dead”’ address the the reflections of the transformation societies have gone through under the influence of globalizsation, neoliberalism and technological developments. We live in an informationabundant society, which makes us feel empowered. According to Vassaf, this sense of control condemns us to a thoughtless/emotionless routine: fast food, fast sex, fast news, fast cultures. At the same time, we live in a society where we can prepare food, play music, do our laundry and make war merely by pressing a button. (200) According to Vassaf, these are the distinctive characteristics of a refined totalitarian society. In crude totalitarian societies an informed population is a danger to the viability of 130

Book Reviews the government. However, in refined totalitarian societies, a population that thinks that it is informed is a must for the continu is essential for the survival of the power structure. (92) Therefore, a refined totalitarian onesociety appears to be a multi-choice and democratic, whereas in truth it is a society that is confined to restricted choices, as in the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. While sharing his observations from a subjective perspective on universal themes from love to creativity, from reproduction to the totalitarian use of space in modern lives, Vassaf does neither dictate one particular way of thinking, nor does he subordinate any idea, ideology, group or person to another. By using the first person plural in his essays, Vassaf counts himself in the group of people who are imprisoned themselves inby a totalitarian order. Occasionally, the language of which Vassaf warns against its authoritative potential may adopt an assertive tone to reinforce his arguments. Nonetheless, the book is a groundbreaking and thoughtprovoking work in the sense that it provides an alternative reading of generally accepted truths and thus fosters critical thinking.

Aysun Kıran University College London/Marmara University

131

E. Melek Cevahiroğlu Ömür The Sounds of Silence, Turkey’s Armenians Speak. Ferda Balancar. İstanbul: Uluslararası Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları, 2012. 175 pp. ISBN 978-605-62862-0-9 (paperback). Price 15 TL. The Sounds of Silence is a significant text insofar as it uses oral history to give voice to those groups of people who have hitherto been marginalized. The book offers an alternative interpretation of early twentieth century history, with particular reference to the Armenian community in Turkey. The project was inspired by the academic Ferda Balacar who got in touch with Armenians living in İstanbul as well as those living in other areas of Anatolia. She managed to collect fifteen different stories from respondents whose ages range from 19 to 70 years old. The stories they tell are often harrowing: many of them talk about their ancestors who were brutally murdered by the Ottoman forces; others recall how their livelihoods were threatened by the punitive Wealth and Revenue Tax imposed by the Turkish government in 1945. The book itself is dedicated to the memory of writer/journalist Hrant Dink, who spent much of his life writing about Armenian identity and Turkish Armenian relations. He was gunned down in cold blood on 19 January 2007; afterwards, the Hrant Dink Foundation Foundation undertook the responsibility of continuing his work. They not only wanted to find out more about Turkey’s Armenian population, but tried to show how the experience of the Armenians differed from that of many marginalized groups in other contexts - for example, African Americans in the United States. Viewed from this perspective, The Sounds of Silence takes on a renewed significance. It is not only a record of individual people’s hopes, expectations, disappointments, and traumas, but it brings to the surface experiences with a universal as well as a culture-specific significance. We understand how the past has a significant influence over the present; how the experiences of a century ago continue to shape the way we live now. The Sounds of Silence offers a series of recollections concerning the ways in which individuals negotiate their identity as Armenian Turks, as well as living with the so-called “dead hand” of the past. They have not been as fortunate as those who left Armenia for a new life in the United 132

Book Reviews States. Whereas Armenian Americans have been able to negotiate their dual identities, many Armenian Turks have been born Armenian, converted to Islam and thereby turned their backs on their Armenian identity. This kind of “silence” has often proved traumatic for them, even though they have sustained a façade of respectability. The book gives them the chance to speak up for the first time. Bearing this in mind, we should not look for historical accuracy in The Sounds of Silence, but rather approach the text as a celebration of plural identities. It is an important work that tells us a lot about Turkish histories, as well as helping us understand how the experiences of the Armenian community both parallels yet differs from those of other marginalized communities in America and elsewhere. E. Melek Cevahiroğlu Ömür Boğaziçi University

133

Eda Dedebaş The Istanbul Review: A Literary Journal. İstanbul: Boyut Yayınları, and İstanbul Literatür ve Yayın Evi, 2012- ISSN 2346-9547. Price 20 TL. The İstanbul Review, a semi-annual literary journal founded by Miriam Johnson, the managing editor, and Hande Zapsu Watt, the editorin-chief, published two issues in its first year. A literary journal that publishes creative works as well as interviews with writers and critics and book reviews, the İstanbul Review caters for the tastes of a variety of readers, academics and critics. As it says on its website, the journal aims “to bring together writers, critics and those influential people from other walks of life whose lives have been changed by literature and who in turn change the world. The journal exists to bridge gaps, to cross borders and to be a platform for world literature.” In addition, the editorial board highlights the journal’s mission in building literary bridges among writers from all over the world just as the city of İstanbul connects the East and the West. Following this philosophy, the first issue of the journal (Summer 2012) brought together interviews with politicians such as Tayyip Erdoğan and Gerhard Schroeder as well as with popular writers such as Elif Shafak and Paolo Coelho. The first issue, themed “The State of Literature,” published short stories, poems, book reviews and essays and included creative works from canonical writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sir Terry Pratchett and interviews from less canonical writers such as Banana Yoshimoto. In its second issue (Winter 2012), The Istanbul Review turned to “The Screen of Literature”, joining the literary world with the visual world. The second issue not only included artistic works by Sena, Oğuz Demir and Geoff Gossett but also focused on the themes of cinematic adaptation and translation. The motif of cinema and the cinematic adaptation of literary works drew together six people from different walks of life in interviews. The interviewees were an Academy Award Winner Australian illustrator Shaun Tan, who combines words with his drawings; Turkish director Osman Sinav, who talks about classical works of literature adapted for television and cinema; Korean writer Kyung-Sook Shin, who discusses transforming “sad experiences into beautiful lines”; Turkish screenwriter Nilgün Öneş, who writes scripts for popular TV series; Hollywood producer Gianni Nunnari; and Chinese designer Shan Jiang, who narrates his stories through illustrations. By bringing together these six people to 134

Book Reviews discuss literature and its aesthetic adaptations into television, film, and art, the İstanbul Review proves that it has built bridges among a variety of writers, artists and directors through the common thread of literature. A similar sense of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism is apparent in the short stories published in the second issue. The short stories take readers on a journey around the world and bring to light contemporary issues such as multinationalism, immigration, and alienation in modern life. Singaporean writer Jeremy Tiang’s “Sophia’s Honeymoon” narrates the story of a Singaporean lower-class woman, who marries an elitist upper-class English man, Nick. As Sophia, the protagonist, feels alienated by the luxurious dinner party and the opera house in Zurich during her honeymoon, the modern-day reader finds similarities between him or herself and Sophia in their alienation. In Robert Rigney’s “Traffic Noise and Balkan Sounds”, however, this cosmopolitan world is fused into a harmonized colorful mosaic. Set in Neukölln, a neighborhood of Berlin populated by immigrants, Rigney’s short story provides a quick peek into the lives of immigrants living in Germany. As immigrants from Turkey, Africa, Europe and the Balkans dance together with the melodies of Gypsy musician Christian, they create a community of brotherhood until a police car arrives. Along with its theme of cinematic adaptation and the relationship between literature, cinema and other visual arts, the last pages of the journal are devoted to six book reviews (The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, In the Winter Dark by Tim Winton, Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, Q & A by Vikus Swarup, The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende), all of which are novels that have been adapted into film. As the reviewers discuss each novel, they conclude with an analogy between the novel and its cinematic adaptation and so pay tribute to the journal’s recurring theme in the second issue. The İstanbul Review ventures into a market that has already been saturated and takes on a challenging goal with its mission to bring together writers, critics and people from all walks of life. The first two issues are proof positive of the journal’s genuine engagement with world literature thanks to its inclusion of works of writers from Korea, China, Singapore and Australia. Moreover, through its use of themes, it analyzes and develops a common thread through its broad range of writers, genres, interviewees and artistic designs. The attempt to embrace people from different backgrounds as well as to include writers from outside the canon 135

Eda Dedebaş and popular literature is revealed in the next issue (Vol.3, forthcoming in Winter 2013), which centers upon “Red” and has already a variety of contributors including Turkish-American businessman Muhtar Kent, CEO of The Coca-Cola Company and Ugandan poet Nalugwa Kiguli. Works Cited “The İstanbul Review.” Theistanbulreview.com. 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. Eda Dedebaş University of Nevada, Reno

136

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 38 (2013): 137-159

Film Reviews (The Editors wish to thank Vincent M. Gaine for his editorial work on this section) Game of Thrones. Dir. Alan Taylor, Alex Graves et. al. Perf. Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, Maisie Williams. HBO, 2011. TV series. Game of Thrones first appeared on the premium cable channel HBO in 2011 and has proven to be a remarkable success, not only in the USA but around the world. In many ways the show’s Tolkienesque fantasy setting and story conventions seem familiar, but its narrative unfolds in the structurally dense manner which has been the hallmark of previous HBO dramas such as The Sopranos, Deadwood and Boardwalk Empire. In this way Game of Thrones gives familiar genre elements an original treatment, revealing surprising nuances in characters who initially seem conventional, and pulling the carpet beneath its viewers with audacious plot revelations and reversals. Adapted from George R. R. Martin’s currently unfinished novel cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, the show’s main achievement may be the sheer scale of its narrative. The first season introduced the majority of the leading characters in a single location, but as time has passed the world of the show has both expanded and fragmented, scattering protagonists to all corners of its fictional kingdom while continually adding new characters and storylines. Due to this narrative escalation, recent episodes have bounced between scenes filmed in Northern Ireland, Iceland, Croatia and Malta, typically checking in on storylines for a few minutes before taking flight for a new location. Unlike the self-contained story-arcs used to structure much contemporary serialized television, there is little sense of conventional narrative climax from episode to episode, or even from season to season. At times it seems that the multi-stranded story has been divided almost arbitrarily into 60-minute portions. But despite its sprawling structure, Game of Thrones manages to be surprisingly coherent, at least for viewers immersed in the details of its plot. The spaces of the show are diffuse, but

Jonathan Stubbs the action is thematically patterned so that individual episodes are able to address specific ideas, such as the gulf between honor and realpolitik, the burden of meeting family and ancestral expectations, and the moral effects of ambition. The popularity of Game of Thrones also serves as a fascinating bellwether for the on-going transformation of the American television industry. Despite appearing on an expensive pay-cable service, the show has regularly attracted more than five million viewers, outpacing many high-profile serials on the traditional network channels. However, Game of Thrones reaches an even larger audience through “informal” distribution networks. Figures published on the website Torrentfreak suggest that over the past two years Game of Thrones has clocked up more unauthorized downloads than any other TV show. HBO’s subscription business model has clearly been effective up to a point, but its high cost makes the show susceptible to piracy. In keeping with its presence within informal internet distribution networks, Game of Thrones has also been the subject of considerable online activity. Websites such as Slate, the Huffington Post and Salon post detailed weekly “recap” reviews appended with thousands of reader comments, while the AV Club website highlights the hierarchical nature of fan consumption by posting separate reviews for ‘experts’ who have read the books and ‘newbies’ who have not. Fan activity has also taken the form of numerous blogs and Tumblrs dedicated to the repurposing and remixing of images from the show. My particular favorite is ArrestedWesteros.com, which combinessimages from Game of Thrones with dialogue from cult sitcom Arrested Development. Hilarious for those who happen to love both shows, but utterly incomprehensible for those unfamiliar with them. For all its success, however, it’s not clear how the series will proceed in the longer term. Much rests on the shoulders of George R. R. Martin, as it seems more than possible that the television show will overtake the novel cycle on which it is based at some point in the next few years. Martin has been writing new installments every 2 to 6 years, while the television show is committed to a yearly production schedule. Even if Martin picks up the pace, there could be trouble ahead, posing intriguing and possible unique challenges for the production team of this highly accomplished show.

138

Film Reviews Works Cited

Arrested Development. Dir. Troy Miller, Mitchell Hurwitz et. al. Perf. Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, Portia Di Rossi. 2003-13. TV Series. “Arrested Westeros: Game of Thrones, Arrested Arrestedwesteros.com, 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.

Development.”

Boardwalk Empire. Dir. Martin Scorsese, Timothy van Patten et. al. Perf. Steve Buscemi, Kelly Macdonald, Michael Shannon. HBO 2010--. TV Series. Deadwood. Dir. Ed Bianchi, Daniel Minahan et. al. Perf. Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane, Molly Parker. HBO 2010--. TV Series. “Game of Thrones: Experts.” The AV Club, 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2013. “Game of Thrones: Newbies.” The AV Club, 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2013. Martin, George R. R. A Song of Ice and Fire. New York: Bantam Books, 1996. Print. The Sopranos. Dir. Timothy van Patten, John Patterson et. al. Perf. James Gandolfini, Lorraine Bracco, Edie Falco. HBO 1999-2007. TV Series. Jonathan Stubbs Cyprus International University

139

Wickham Clayton Brave. Dirs. Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. Perf. Kelly Macdonald, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson. Walt Disney Pictures / Pixar Animation Studios, 2012. Film.

The golden rule of family movies is to reach the broadest demographic. Do not make them too shrill for adults, nor too nuanced (or dull) for children, and cater to everything in between. The problem is that most movies in this category either ignore the rule, or find it too difficult to strike that balance. However, Disney’s Pixar Studios has been consistently achieving this for almost twenty years. One of the studio’s most recent offerings, Brave, remains well within this tradition. Set in medieval Scotland, the story follows Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), a young princess whose relationship with her mother (Emma Thompson) is tested when it is revealed Merida must choose an eligible suitor from the agreed noble families. It is apparent that her mother’s teaching and training has been leading up to this point, which becomes a source of contention and even resentment. After a heated exchange, Merida runs into the woods and encounters a witch (Julie Walters) who creates a concoction which, when imbibed by Merida’s mother, transforms her into a giant bear. This is particularly unfortunate as Merida’s father (Billy Connolly) lost his leg in a fight with a bear many years ago, which has made him eager to hunt them when they appear in the vicinity. What follows is a journey, in a literal sense, to discover a way to reverse the spell, and on a spiritual level, an increased understanding between mother and daughter. In line with much of Pixar’s output, Brave develops complex and nuanced characterisations from its central figures, specifically Merida and her mother. As a result, the relationship between the two is not only believable but rewarding. It is this very relationship that provides the tension and drive for much of the narrative; Merida’s own desires for independence from tradition is at odds with her mother’s intent to instill long-held values in her daughter. Merida’s justifiable indignation at a forced marriage is gradually complicated by the gradual understanding of her mother’s point of view – which is itself successfully communicated in spite of the tremendous complication of her mother being a bear. It is 140

Film Reviews here that the technological and aesthetic feats of Brave become not only relevant, but utterly necessary to understanding how and why this film is the broadly-pleasing artistic success that it is. What is immediately apparent is the advancement, even within the last decade, of computer generated imaging. There are the requisite exhibitionistic elements: the detailed rendering of Merida’s curly, subtly shaded, and slightly tangled red locks, the definition in animal fur as its owner is in motion, and even a dazzling, yet superfluous demonstration that occurs as Merida stands next to a waterfall, and the minute molecules of water mist, splash, and spray are clearly depicted. All of this lends the interest of spectacle, but technological advancement doesn’t serve only this. In comparison with the eerily death-mask-blank poreless faces of Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007), Brave stops short of trying to replicate ‘realistic’ faces. Instead, the movie opts for a standardised design whereby the animated format is apparent, but facial features of the characters are smoothly integrated with the colors, lines, and curves of this fantasy world. The faces are also malleable to the point where every tic, gesture, and expression is not only pitch perfect for the performance, but communicates the appropriate information without jarring against the narrative or the visual surroundings. Pixar has perfected CGI so that it facilitates excellent performances, and enhances the already stellar voice acting work, in this case by Macdonald, Connolly, and Thompson. Furthermore, there is a distinct attempt at creating a particularly smooth yet propulsive aesthetic. The image appears to be consistently moving and altering, from majestic, sweeping camera shots, to non-jarring yet incredibly rapid editing rhythms. This is supported and in many cases held together by stunning sound work throughout. Overall, the film holds together well throughout, and apart from a few sequences that contribute to the spectacle of the technology used to render the images, every element of the film serves the narrative superbly. And this is where the film achieves entertainment value for the widest possible demographic: it is an interesting story with a sufficient amount of narrative hooks and a smoothly integrated and fluctuating emotional tone, without seeming jarring or to be ticking requisite boxes. 141

Wickham Clayton One could make the argument that, if Brave had a failing, it would be that the narrative retains too much complexity and too many set pieces for its relatively short running- time, and therefore lacks the simplistic charm of Pixar’s Toy Story films, or Monsters, Inc. (2001), for example. However, I would argue that as the aesthetic not only allows this, but develops the story in a way that it is understandable and accessible to the very young and, at the same time, enjoyable for older viewers, is a significant accomplishment. While there is something to be said for streamlined, simple charms, Brave has what is necessary to captivate a wide demographic, which is what is needed for viewers to feel that engaging with this movie is time and money well spent. Ultimately, I found Brave to be one of Pixar Studios’s very best offerings. In every respect, it is a highly accomplished film with a compelling narrative, excellent voice performances, detailed and immersive CGI, and intricate audio design. There is more than enough to recommend Brave, and it is overall a delightful and spectacular experience. Works Cited Beowulf. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perf. Ray Winstone, Crispin Glover, Angelina Jolie. Paramount Pictures/ Shangri-La Entertainment, 2007. Film. Monsters, Inc. Dir. Pete Docter. Voices Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Mary Gibbs. Walt Disney Pictures/ Pixar Animaton Studios, 2001. Film. The Polar Express. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Voices Tom Hanks, Chris Coppola, Michael Jeter. Castle Rock Entertainment/ Shangri-La Entertainment, 2004. Film. Wickham Clayton Roehampton University, UK

142

Film Reviews Breathe In. Dir. Drake Doremus. Perf. Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Mackenzie Davis. Indian Paintbrush/ Sugar Crispy Entertainment, 2013. Film Breathe In is Drake Doremus’s follow-up to festival favurite Like Crazy (2011). The story is a snapshot of the lives of an upstate New York family changed forever by the arrival of a British exchange student, Sophie, a talented pianist mature beyond her 18 years. Felicity Jones is again Doremus’s romantic lead, this time opposite Guy Pearce. While Jones was beguiling as early 20-something Anna in Like Crazy, she struggles here in her attempt to play a character 12 years her junior Pearce and Amy Ryan are Keith and Megan Reynolds who have been married for seventeen years and have a seventeen-year-old daughter. The couple obviously married young, and now feel oppressed by domesticity and aggrieved at the compromises they have made. Keith is a musician who teaches high school music classes and moonlights as a cellist in an orchestra. Megan refers to the latter as his “hobby” in a moment that neatly sums up the current state of their marriage. For her part, Megan claims she “enjoys” driving her family around to their various commitments while spending her free time collecting and selling cookie jars. The latter is almost tragic in its lack of irony, but sadly the talented Ryan (The Wire) is underused and the cookie jars are awkwardly symbolic and painfully revisited as a storytelling short-cut. While Sophie is a more three-dimensional figure, we are told rather than shown that, as an aspiring pianist, she has no idea why she is playing because her uncle has recently died. Whilst Like Crazy felt fresh and brave in its portrayal of first love both in its ecstasy and agony, Breathe In quickly descends into cliché and heavy-handed metaphors. While Sophie is mature for her age – and Keith points this out for anyone in the audience who had yet to realize – she makes a couple of remarkably naive decisions. The first of these results in Keith and Megan’s only daughter, Lauren (Mackenzie Davis), feeling betrayed by Sophie who she had very generously welcomed into her high school social circle. To ramp up the tension, the two girls share a bedroom. This in itself is a bit jarring as the exterior shots of the house show it to be quite large (enough to fit a grand piano in comfortably) but Lauren is bafflingly expected to share her small bedroom with a stranger for the duration of a year. This is 143

Jennifer Oey a small point of irritation but one that contributes to a bigger problem with believability. Lauren is Sophie’s opposite; she’s tall, athletic, and innocent to a fault, like a gawky fawn stumbling through everyone else’s drama, while being unaware of how charmed her existence is. In many ways, the story is about Lauren and her coming of age. Viewed from this angle, the story might have had more potential. Instead it is a very predictable drama about an older man looking to revisit his youth vicariously through an affair with an “exotic” young woman. Sophie’s old-soul sensibility and love of music genuinely seems like a good match for Keith, but their interactions lack the electricity one might expect of a forbidden affair and are instead gentle and comfortable. Doremus takes pains to communicate how happy and pretty the Reynolds family is; beautiful house in a green corner of New York State, jokey interactions and wholesome “games nights”, and family portraits that they genuinely seem to enjoy having taken. On closer inspection, of course, the family is not communicating with one another in a meaningful way and it takes little strain for the pretence to crumble very quickly. While the scenes of blissful domesticity are meant to be a façade of a family going through the motions, they are painfully predictable and suggest the filmmaker was also simply going through the motions. When Sophie, the interloper, is introduced to this delicate microcosm, the ripples start small and increase over time. When she is quite rude to her hosts, it can be dismissed as cultural micommunication: Because she is too mature to be a petulant teenager, it is her Britishness that explains away her behaviur. Ultimately this “foreign body” is treated like a diseased extra limb that can simply be amputated, consequence-free, the wound allowed to heal over time and this does not make for an absorbing exploration of adultery. Doremus worked with his biggest budget yet on this film and with money comes extra pressure and often also interference. Filmmaking is not an exact science and even good directors do not get it right every time. I would not retract my previous (unpublished) declaration that Doremus is worth keeping an eye on, but his potential is not manifestly on display in Breathe In.

144

Film Reviews Works Cited

Like Crazy. Dir. Drake Doremus. Perf. Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence. Paramount Vintage/ Indian Paintbrush, 2011. Film. The Wire. Dir. Joe Chappelle et. al. Perf. Dominic West, John Doman, Deirdre Lovejoy. Blown Deadline Productions/ HBO, 2002-8. TV Series. Jennifer Oey University of East Anglia, UK

145

Patrick Smith Pieta. Dir. Ki-duk Kim. Perf. Lee Jung-jin, Jo Min-su, Kang Eun-jin. Good Film/ Finecut, 2012. Film. Ki-duk Kim has received some of the most polarized critical treatment for a generally accepted mainstream “art house” director. His work has been predominantly well enshrined, though some would argue fortunately programmed, within festival circuits, claiming both the 2011 Un Certain Regard at Cannes and the 2012 Golden Lion at Venice. Though receiving these ever decreasingly lauded prizes, the critical reception, both immediate (festival walkouts/heckles) and retrospective, (CinemaScope’s recent roundtable trashing) has been generally unfavorable towards Kim’s work. Kim’s festival success has been used as a stick by several critics to question the validity and expose the insularity of festival programming. Why then such a polarity? His most recent work Pieta, the aforementioned winner at Venice, offers a good entry point to understating this critical split. The film offers quite a good “grab-bag” of Kim’s often troubling and divisive thematic preoccupations. Pieta centers on Kang-do Lee (Jeong-jin Lee) an extremely violent and episodically misanthropic loan shark, lending predominantly to smalltime mechanics and metalworkers. To protect loans Lee lets debtors sign insurance claims for injury. He then sadistically cripples them using their own machinery, thus collecting any unpaid interest. A woman (Min-su Jo) claiming to be Lee’s mother attempts to infiltrate his hermetic existence and soften his stone-like heart. The film shifts from out-and-out sadism in its early stages, into a grotesque Oedipal love story between the supposed mother and son. Alongside this main narrative Kim tries to attach several moralistic parables; the corrupting influence of money, the effects of childhood neglect and the struggles of family reintegration. Two of Kim’s continually returning and idiosyncratic narrative devices are also present, namely male dominance/violence towards subordinate female characters and violence towards animals. It has been widely discussed that Kim’s consistent use of such devices has extended beyond a possible self-referential critique, descending instead into abhorrent and schlocky spectacle. When Kim tries to balance dogmatic moralism and these more straightforwardly repellent sequences, the film descends into a bathos-inducing mess. Lurching between execrable shocks and pseudo-ethical posturing, the film lacks any clarity of purpose and is thereby open to easy ridicule. 146

Film Reviews In addition to this thematic disjuncture Kim has cultivated a very particular and peculiar way of shooting, due in large part to his transition to digital. A majority of shots are very darkly lit, often providing some displeasing pixilation feedback. In addition Kim has also developed a penchant for unsettling and jerky hand held digital zooms. The presence of these unusual stylistic markings throws the viewer outside the narrative world,pemphasizing instead the presence of the camera and adding to the film’s bathos inducing effect. There is an argument to be made that these thematic and stylistic quirks are intentionally built into the film’s fabric by Kim. Indeed, the stilted performances of Lee and Jo seem to exist somewhere between the deconstructive performance protocols employed by Bresson and Brecht. I would argue, however, that within Pieta and across Kim’s oeuvre more generally, these disjunctures do not fulfill the same deconstructive purpose. Rather, Kim fails to deliver the straighter moralistic messages he is striving for, due to an irreconcilable clash with the film’s more abhorrent elements. To put it rather crudely, it is almost as though Kim wants to “have his cake and eat it” by proffering a moralistic stance whilst being repeatedly sadistic to both his female cast and his entire audience. Kim himself has spoken of how “we must learn that this age of ours is one of violence and that nobody is safe from violence. Once rooted, violence keeps growing, spreading, and getting nastier as we see it every day.” Whilst this statement has some general merit to it, I feel that Kim’s work embodies rather than critiques such a position. As violence continually infiltrates his films, they struggle to avoid being read as simply and straightforwardly nasty. Kim strives to make his films work on two levels; however, the more abhorrent elements usually overshadow any dialectic he aims to set up. With Pieta we have a work that struggles to ascend to the high moralism that particular passages strive for. The reference to Michelangelo’s 1498 Renaissance sculpture in the film’s title is perhaps the most ironic embodiment of Kim’s failure: he has created a film that strives for fluid transitions between opposing ideologies, but we are ultimately left with an incomplete and immovable obelisk, thwarted by its own contradictions. Patrick Smith King’s College, London 147

William Proctor Side Effects. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law. Endgame Entertainment/ Di Bonaventura Pictures, 2013. Film.

Since the release of Palme D’Or winner, sex lies, and videotape in 1989, Steven Soderbergh has successfully straddled the boundary between indie and mainstream cinemas. From political biopic, Che (2008) and apocalyptic medical thriller Contagion (2011) to Rat Pack remake Ocean’s Eleven (2001), he often traverses the generic frontier which makes it somewhat difficult to pigeonhole him into a neatly labeled box – which is, for this reviewer, where his aesthetic power lies. In 2013, the sad news that Soderbergh is retiring from filmmaking is offset somewhat by his intention to direct theater and even a television series. His swansong, the Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra (2013), was preceded by Side Effects, which demonstrates his penchant for sleightof-hand thrillers in the Hitchcockian tradition, complete with MacGuffin and a head-twisting narrative volte face. One gets the impression that the director wanted to tick the genre off his corpulent résumé before he ventured into new aesthetic pastures. What is frustrating about Side Effects is the dust that is kicked up about the pharmaceutical industry and then subtly cast aside in favor of a more conventional thriller narrative. Jude Law plays psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks, a likeable character faced with a morass of moral and ethical conundrums that put him and his family through the ringer. Banks is not a morally bankrupt character, but a rounded, complex individual who, above all else, wants to do the right thing. He is, however, tempted by the promise of a financial windfall should he participate in a drug trial. The motivation behind his decision lies not with a penchant for profitmongering per se – he lives in a beautiful loft apartment and clearly has a decent if not lavish lifestyle – but he struggles to succeed economically due to his spouse’s unemployment and his duties as familial bread-winner. The possibility of increasing his salary proves a temptation too much and it is here that the character is put on trial when he comes into contact with Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara). 148

Film Reviews Taylor becomes Banks’s latest patient as she fights depression and is hospitalized following a near fatal “accident” as she drives her car into a brick wall at breakneck speed. She has battled depression in the past and the “noonday demon” has returned with menace and threat as her boyfriend (Channing Tatum) is released from prison after being found guilty of insider trading. The so-called “science” of psychiatric medicine is depicted as one of trial and error rather than a exact and reliable practice, as Taylor experiences abysmal side effects from the SSRIs (Serotonin Selective Reuptake Inhibitors) which supposedly counterbalance mental health sufferers by increasing the body’s natural supply of serotonin, our biological mood regulator. Taylor’s libido is negatively affected and she is confronted with dizziness, insomnia and other catastrophes. Thus begins the psychiatrist-patient relationship of “pill-popping” – or, rather, “pill-hopping” – as she and Banks seek to discover the best means to combat the challenges of depression. This segment of the film is handled well and illustrates the pitfalls of psychological treatment vis-à-vis medication as opposed to the benefits of therapy and other talking palliatives. When Dr. Banks is offered the opportunity to expand his practice through trialing drugs, he jumps at the chance. On the surface, this seems like an easy way to make money, and at this point in the narrative, Law’s character does not waiver or consider the wider implications of his decision. There is a brief scene where Banks explains the nature of the trial to a patient who, upon learning of the cost-free aspect of partaking in the trial, shrugs her shoulders and signs the waiver to take the medication, Ablixa. Soderbergh handles these issues subtly but with considerable power and profundity. Emily Taylor’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Victoria Siebert, (Catherine Zeta Jones) converses with Banks and advocates using Ablixa to treat her expatient, about whom she has intimate knowledge. When Taylor requests Ablixa, citing a work colleague’s declaration of the drug’s efficacy, Banks can’t believe his luck and prescribes the drug. Taylor begins to steadily improve; it seems that she can begin to rebuild her fractured, fragile psychology and return to a life without the awful affliction of depression. One side effect of the new medication, however, is somnambulism or, in lay person’s terms, sleepwalking. The atmosphere is brilliantly charged with foreboding and a creepy ambience unsettles both boyfriend and audience in turn (or at least this reviewer). One episode ends in tragedy as Taylor prepares the dinner table and when interrupted by her boyfriend, turns around and stabs him to death. 149

William Proctor Emily Taylor is arrested and put on trial – or more pointedly as the case may be, Ablixa is put on trial and, by extension, Jonathan Banks who prescribed the medication. Up to this point, the film’s critique of the pharmaceutical industry and its method of human trials are also put in the dock, as is the psychiatrist whose life begins to collapse around him. It is here that the narrative changes: what began as an investigation into the morality of clinical trials morphs into a conventional thriller with Banks trying to uncover the deception that has transformed him into a victim. What if Emily Taylor was faking everything in order to cause stock market fluctuations and make a quick buck in the process? This is the great failure of Side Effects. Whilst Soderbergh handles the narrative sleight-of-hand with deft and expertise, and provides intensity and suspense enough to hold the viewers’ attention, the dénouement leaves a bad taste in the mouth considering the weight of the thematic arc that the film puts into motion. Law is on excellent form, and it is difficult not to empathize with a character who has the figurative rug pulled out from him by Taylor. Zeta Jones’s performance as Banks’ psychiatric peer, Dr. Victoria Siebert, is solid and, at times, sinister, but the dénouement becomes rather absurd and groan-inducing in view of the turn to erotic stereotypes and an alarming demonization of lesbianism. The representation of gender in the film is extremely problematic: the mentally compromised female (Taylor) is conniving, pernicious and amoral (despite her painstakingly constructed façade as mental health sufferer). Similarly, Siebert as lesbian co-conspirator is demonstrably cartoon-like in the finale as she is revealed as the chief villain. Side Effects is a tale of two halves: an engaging treatise on the pharmaceutical industry and the veracity of psychiatric treatment and a trite thriller whose ending is too contrived to take seriously. Still, the dust kicked up along the way is interesting and one may forgive Soderbergh, alongside screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, for experimenting with the genre form to include serious, topical explorations of contemporary issues. Works Cited Behind the Candelabra. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Eric Zuckerman. HBO Films, 2013. TV Film. 150

Film Reviews Che. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Julia Ormond, Benicio del Toro, Oscar Isaac. Wild Bunch/ Telecinco/ Laura Bickford Productions, 2008. Film. Contagion. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law. Warner Bros./ Participant Media, 2011. Film. Ocean’s Eleven. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Perf. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts. Warner Bros/ Village Roadshow Pictures, 2001. Film. William Proctor University of Sunderland, UK

151

S. Yiğit Soncul Moonrise Kingdom. Dir. Wes Anderson. Perf. Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis. Indian Paintbrush/ American Empirical Pictures/ Moonrise/ Scott Rudin Productions, 2012. Film. The American auteur Wes Anderson’s latest feature to date enjoyed critical acclaim across the world and was the opening film of the sixtyfifth annual Cannes Film Festival in 2012. Besides being the director, Anderson is also the co-writer of Moonrise Kingdom with Roman Coppola. The film represents the apex of Anderson’s distinct visual aesthetics and screenwriting that he has developed throughout his filmography, starting from the late nineties with Bottle Rocket (1996). Sentimental and naïve narratives accompanied by pastel tones within the frames are some of the discernible characteristics of Anderson’s films among others, and Moonrise Kingdom is no exception. The film’s opening title sequence features Benjamin Britten’s musical composition “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” as a voiceover through a record that is being played within the film, where a child narrator defines the groups of instruments utilized in an orchestra. This track functions as a prologue to the film and offers a keyword that can help us to define the term “orchestration.” Moonrise Kingdom’s peculiar narration, particularly, comprises costuming, coloring, composition, framing and camera movements, which are orchestrated in such a way as to draw the viewers’ attention to them. This effect does not seem accidental, since within the film we can observe some similar emphases on artisanship and authenticity. The film is set in September 1965 on a New England island, and central to the narrative is the romantic relationship between two unruly twelve-year-olds, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). Sam is an orphan and is on the island to attend a summer camp as a scout where he is not accepted by the rest of the group because he is “emotionally disturbed,” whereas Suzy is the daughter of the island’s resident lawyers and the most rebellious child of four siblings. The island is the perfect locale to communicate the protagonists’ condition, since both of them are detached from their social surroundings as the setting is detached from the mainland. The misfits meet a year before running away together and plan the escape throughout the year. The end of the summer 152

Film Reviews of 1965 coincides with the protagonists’ end of childhood — the threshold of their teen years. Sam is extraordinarily talented in anything associated with being a scout, like reading a map, building a tent, and marksmanship; and Suzy carries with her a pile of books and a record player. These traits are in line with their positions as outsiders and are juxtaposed with those of their peers. Moreover, they engage in activities which can be associated more with the historical period in which the film has been set, such as the uses of handwriting, mail, and binoculars, which are emphasized through close-ups. If their escape from places into which they do not fit marks the protagonists’ individuality, this is also conveyed through their mastery of crafts and possession of these unique items. Much like the film itself, these characters are separated from the rest through their choice of objects and mastery of skills. Moonrise Kingdom favors the crafts and the tools of Sixties history both in its formal construction and within the world of the film; we long for the things that have been lost in between. The threshold, which has been conveyed through the end of summer and the protagonists’ ages, is also visible through the contrast between past and present, a contrast that exists both for viewers and characters. Works Cited Bottle Rocket. Dir. Wes Anderson. Perf. Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Ned Dowd. Columbia Pictures/ Gracie Films, 1996. Film. S. Yiğit Soncul Goldsmiths College, University of London

153

Vincent M. Gaine Man of Steel. Dir. Zack Snyder. Perf. Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon. Warner Bros., 2013. Film. Superman is both the pinnacle of superheroes and among the most difficult to dramatize. Over the course of the character’s history, his powers have developed and his adversaries have had to be ever more inventive in order to pose a challenge to him. On the big screen, Superman has been represented six times between 1978 and 2013, but whereas the previous films can be included in the same narrative, Man of Steel reboots the franchise for a fresh start, much like The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008), The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012) and, of course, Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005). Batman Begins is a clear influence on Man of Steel, with co-writers Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer drawing on the template of their earlier reboot. Man of Steel makes extensive use of flashbacks to build the character of Kal El/Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), his physical journey, both geographically and in terms of developing his powers, intercut with his earlier emotional and psychological growth, which are both inspiring and traumatic. Clark’s powers as a child are frightening to himself and others, demonstrated in an early scene in which he sees through people and objects and the cacophony of sounds become overwhelming. Hiding in a closet is no escape, as his own X-ray vision continues to terrify him and his eye beams burn those who approach. Only his mother Martha Kent (Diane Lane) calms him, as she urges Clark to make the world smaller. In keeping with this imperative, the film focuses on small details, from the corner of a desk to blades of grass, Snyder’s close-ups and unsteady cinematography bringing the viewer close to the events both visually and experientially. Sometimes the shaky cam is overdone, especially in the opening sequence set on Krypton, but overall, Snyder displays considerable sensitivity and restraint. The film’s focus on Clark’s experience draws the viewer into the hero’s journey of self-discovery. The development of Clark’s super-identity is again similar to that of Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, and like that origin story, it is one hour into the film that our hero appears in his signature uniform, which thankfully looks more like a suit of armor than a skintight leotard. This reveal is a fitting culmination of the previous 154

Film Reviews hour, which steadily builds a character possessed of amazing abilities, but also experiencing fear, doubt, compassion and courage. Clark’s powers never overwhelm his identity: the man always prefigures the steel. This careful character development ensures that the viewer is with Kal when he embarks on his super journey, his first flights that are both awkward and exhilarating for character and viewer alike, thanks to the intimate style which takes us along for the ride. Similarly, when Kal opposes General Zod’s (Michael Shannon’s) invasion of Earth, the viewer’s engagement with him ensures we share his trepidation and are pulled into the visceral dynamics of the spectacular action sequences. Reviewers and audiences have complained about the third act of Man of Steel being merely action without character, but this misses the establishment of the character which enables us to accompany Kal for his battles. The best superhero films are those that give the viewer an impression of superpowers, and Man of Steel delivers this impression both in the early scenes when Clark is frightened and confused by his powers, and in the kinetic action set-pieces when he must fight for the survival of himself and Earth. Man of Steel also manages to accommodate the problem of invincibility by having Kal fight other Kryptonians who are all super-powered soldiers. It is enjoyably distressing to see Superman being trounced in combat, hurled through buildings and vehicles, clearly hurt if not actually injured. Here too though, the conflict is emotional as well as physical, Zod and Kal fighting for different ideologies. Super-villains sometimes lack depth or convincing motivation, but Zod’s desire is to save his people, which is understandable given the destruction of Krypton. The ideological clash between Kal and Zod adds further depth to their conflict, suggesting that violence could have been avoided. This makes the finale to their battle genuinely shocking, as the result is not inevitable and, once again, the engagement with Kal means that his anguished reaction to what he must do is heart-wrenching. The film does have problems – the handheld cinematography is sometimes overdone, there are too many false starts to the climactic battle between Kal and Zod’s forces, Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is underused and the devastation inflicted by Zod is highly sanitized, plus it lacks humor. Despite these flaws, Man of Steel is both a fine reboot of the Superman franchise and a superhero film that effectively dramatizes what it means to be super and what it means to be a hero. It also has an interesting theme 155

Vincent M. Gaine of aspiration, as Jor El (Russell Crowe) tells his son that he will give the people of Earth something to aspire to and Kal consistently appears as an inspiration for humans to be heroic as well, such as when Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) tries to save Jenny Olsen (Rebecca Buller) who is trapped under débris. Perry is himself in danger, but risks his life to save Jenny, implying that super-powers are not a prerequisite for heroism. Man of Steel, therefore, is both an enjoyable blockbuster and an exploration of heroism, which suggests that, in time, we could all join Kal El “in the sun”. Works Cited The Amazing Spider-Man. Dir. Marc Webb. Perf. Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans. Columbia Pictures/ Marvel Entertainment, 2012. Film. Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe. Warner Bros., 2005. Film. The Incredible Hulk. Dir Louis Leterrier. Perf. Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth. Universal Pictures/ Marvel Enterprises, 2008. Film. Vincent M. Gaine Independent Scholar

156

Film Reviews Elysium. Dir. Neill Blomkamp. Perf. Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley. TriStar Pictures/ Alpha Core, 2013. Film. Neill Blomkamp’s career-making District 9 (2009) may have lacked much in the way of subtlety as it skewered South Africa’s ongoing racial issues with its biting apartheid allegory, but it established him as that rare commodity in an increasingly risk-averse global film industry: a writer/ director who can handle the political and the SFX. When it grossed a $210 million profit from its meager (for effects-heavy sci-fi) $30 million budget, a follow-up was all but assured; it was only the content that was in question. Four years later, the answer is Elysium. It is, in many ways, a frustrating beast: hints of great beauty (both aesthetic and thematic) marred by an excess of ambition - and enough narrative to fill three films. The plot itself is both simple and needlessly complex: in 2154, Earth has become so polluted and over-populated that the super-rich have retreated to Elysium, a luxury space station in orbit around the planet they’ve abandoned to poverty, disease, and squalor. When Max Da Costa (Matt Damon), a career felon trying to go straight, is injured in an industrial accident that leaves him with five days to live, his only chance at survival lies in a desperate bid to reach an Elysian med-bay, futuristic medical technology that can cure any human ill. Unfortunately for Max, Elysium’s exclusivity is ruthlessly maintained by the sinister Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster), who has no qualms about blowing an unauthorized refugee ship, complete with injured children, out of the sky. So far, so political: Elysium overtly parallels contemporary and divisive issues of access to healthcare, immigration and the 1%. Blomkamp notes, in fact, that the seeds of the narrative were sown during a trip to Tijuana, Mexico, where he observed firsthand the geographical dividing line between the First and Second world and the efforts of the former to keep the latter out, and thematically this influence is clear throughout the movie. From the Spanish-speaking protagonists, through a supporting cast drawn largely from South American actors, and down to the choice of Mexico City as a stand-in for the L.A. of the future, the film builds a strong political allegory about the economic desperation on the doorstep of the US and the ethics of providing for one group of people while denying another based, largely, on an accident of birth. Indeed, the Mexico City 157

Rachael Kelly location is a particularly effective mechanism in creating and sustaining the narrative’s overall ethical debate, and it works on at least two levels: both visually (in terms of establishing the mise-en-scène of a world stripped bare by poverty), and by forcibly integrating developing-world poverty into the site of the very developed-world privilege charged with producing the means of its own critique. By transposing Mexico City onto Los Angeles in this way, in other words, the issues that Elysium serves to highlight are, as it were, brought right to the front door. Had the narrative left it at that, Elysium had the potential to be a sharp, smart action thriller with a beating, angry heart: old-school science fiction, designed as a feast for both the eyes and the brain. It remains all of these things; however, somewhere around the middle of the second act, Elysium becomes encumbered by, quite simply, too much plot. To be fair, there’s a clear rationale behind this: getting Max from tech-poor Earth to the fortress of Elysium naturally creates logistical challenges that the movie must answer, and Blomkamp is evidently loth to gloss over the mechanics of Max’s transit with visual spectacle and substance-free action scenes. Instead, he delivers a detailed, information-heavy mid-section that provides a step-by-step account of the journey from A to B that is at once indicative of Blomkamp’s intelligence as a filmmaker (and, one might argue, the intelligence he demands of his audience) and yet introduces a level of complexity that the narrative struggles to maintain. A labyrinthine sequence of events sees Max, freshly suited with a robotic exoskeleton, steal encrypted information from the brain of Elysian CEO John Carlyle (William Fichtner), and thus, unwittingly, upload to his own brain the details of how to hack the station’s security. Jacked into the Elysian mainframe, it could confer citizenship on all of Earth’s dispossessed. The problem? Carlyle has protected the data with a security program that will kill anyone who tries to use it. And this leads us inexorably towards the final act, in which Max, with hours to live, sacrifices his own life in order to open the gates of Elysium to the poor and oppressed of the planet below. It should be noted that this sudden devolution into the quasi-messianic symbolism of saviors, Paradise and freedom from slavery is not, in itself, an unusual path for a science fiction narrative to take, and, if the likes of the Terminator and the Matrix cycles are considerably more overt in constructing their messiahs, Elysium is at least generically consistent. It’s simply that it’s too easy to be satisfying: the solution to the 158

Film Reviews hardships and inequalities that the movie has taken such pains to present amounts to, essentially, switch it off and switch it back on again. But, more than that, there’s the sense of an obligation dodged. Elysium is a movie with a point to make and it presents itself as such, unashamedly, defying us to look away. There are no easy solutions to the problems it writes large across the movie screen: these are issues that have beset human society throughout history, and it’s going to take a collective act of will the likes of which we’ve never before seen to start to set them right. There’s no messiah to electronically reset this system. And it’s something of an evasion to write one into a movie like Elysium. Works Cited District 9. Dir. Neill Blomkamp. Perf. Sharlto Copley, David James, Jason Cope. TriStar Pictures/ Block-Hanson/ WrigNut Films, 2009. Film. Rachael Kelly Independent Scholar

159

.

The Editors welcome submission of material for consideration as an article, as a review, as a comment on articles previously published in Journal of American Studies of Turkey or as a note about past events, announcing coming ones, or constituting calls for papers. The articles should be approximately 3000-5000 words in length (12-20 double-spaced pages); the reviews should not exceed 500 words (two double-spaced typed pages). The articles should be consistent with the objectives and scope of Journal of American Studies of Turkey. All articles are subject to stylistic editing. No material will be considered for publication if it is currently under consideration by another journal or press or if it has been published or is soon to be published elsewhere. Both restrictions apply to the substance as well as to the exact wording of the manuscript. If the manuscript is accepted, the editorial board expects that its appearance in Journal of American Studies of Turkey will precede republication of the essay, or any significant part thereof, in any other work. Authors should allow three to six months for a reply after the submission of the manuscript. Manuscripts should be arranged in the format of articles printed in this issue. The text should be organized under appropriate section headings where possible. Notes, limited to explanatory ones, should be included only when absolutely necessary, and preferably in parenthetical form. The MLA author-page style of documentation should be strictly observed. (See Gibaldi, Joseph. The MLA Manual for Writers of Research Papers. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2000.) Film reviews should be on recent American movies or on movies with topics related to the US. Book reviews should include a brief description of the subjects covered in the book; an evaluation of the book’s strength and weaknesses; and the kind(s) of audiences to whom the book might appeal. The heading of the review should include the following information: a. Title. b. Author(s) or editor(s) names(s). c. Publication date. d. Number of pages. e. Price of book and postage and handling charges (if known). f. Name and address of publisher. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments in rich text format (RTF) or as MS-World file (doc). The copyright of all material published will be vested in Journal of American Studies of Turkey unless otherwise specifically agreed. This copyright covers exclusive rights of publication on printed or electronic media, including the World Wide Web. All correspondence for Journal of American Studies of Turkey should be addressed to: Laurence Raw Başkent University, Department of English, Ankara, Turkey Özlem Uzundemir Çankaya University, Department of English, Ankara, Turkey Berkem Gürenci Sağlam Başkent University, Department of American Culture and Literature, Ankara, Turkey. E-mails [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

IN THIS ISSUE Jim Welsh (1938-2013): An Appreciation Transnational Feminisms: Guest Editor Tanfer Emin Tunç Introduction: Transnational Feminisms Transnational Feminist Pedagogy: An Interview with Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan “Speaking Truth to Power” in Transnational Feminist History Turkey’s Weakest Link From the Holy Land to the New World (and Back): Transnational Arab Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century Writing Body and Culture: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf “I am she who will be free”: June Jordan’s Transnational Feminist Poetics

Laurence Raw

Page Number 1

Tanfer Emin Tunç

5 13

Leila J. Rupp

19

Nicole Pope Dominique Cadinot

25 31

Katherine Lashley

49

Julia Sattler

65

Jinhua Li M. Angela Jansen

83 86

Giovanni Boitani Richard Prentiss

89 93

Steven Rawle Andrew B. R. Elliott Richard Berger Abdulhamit Arvas Danielle Verena Kollig

95 99 102 105 108

Nilsen Gökçen Barry Hudek Michael Saffle Feryal Çubukçu Marcie J. Patton Joshua Carney

111 114 117 120 122 125

Aysun Kıran E. Melek Çevahiroğlu Onur Eda Dedebaş

129 132 134

Jonathan Stubbs Wickham Clayton Jennifer Oey Patrick Smith William Proctor S. Yiğit Soncul Vincent M. Gaine Rachael Kelly

137 140 143 146 148 152 154 157

Transnational Feminisms: Book Reviews Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time Book Reviews Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel: The Uncensored Book Reviews of Classic Images 2001-2010 American Smart Cinema Mass Market Medieval Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens How to be Gay My Culture, My Color, My Self: Heritage, Resilience, and Community in the Lives of Young Adults The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Fifty Years in Constantinople and Recollections of Robert College American-Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture 1830-1980 Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life The Sounds of Silence: Turkey’s Armenians Speak The İstanbul Review: A Literary Journal Film and Television Reviews Game of Thrones Brave Breathe In Pieta Side Effects Moonrise Kingdom Man of Steel Elysium

ISSN 1300-6606 ALP OFSET ANKARA, 2013