		1956
		quarterly
		English, German

		literature, cultural studies, history, political science, linguistics, critical theory, teaching of American Studies

		0340-2827

		Winter


General Editors: Carmen Birkle Birgit Däwes Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp Editorial Board: Christa Buschendorf Ingrid Gessner Anke Ortlepp Heike Paul Marc Priewe Boris Vormann Associate Editors: Cedric Essi Johanna Heil Kathleen Loock Connor Pitetti

For our full submission guidelines, please visit https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/submitting/ For manuscripts and books for review, please contact our review editors at reviews@dgfa.de. There is no obligation to review unsolicited books. Amerikastudien / American Studies E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de In view of the computerized production of the journal, manuscripts of articles and reviews can only be accepted if submitted as computer files (preferably MS Word) and accompanied by a printout. Please note the following formal requirements: – Article manuscripts - manuscript text, abstract, notes, list of works cited - should not exceed 60,000 to 70,000 characters (including spaces). – All articles must be preceded by an abstract in English of no more than 200 words. – Since Amerikastudien / American Studies follows a double blind-peer review system, articles should contain no references to the author. – An Amerikastudien / American Studies style sheet is available under https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/article-style-sheet/ The editorial team gladly provides a MS Word document template file (DOT) that is used for pre-typesetting (preflighting).

Amerikastudien / American Studies

Amerikastudien / American Studies is the journal of the German Association for American Studies. It started as the annual Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien in 1956 and has since developed into a quarterly with some 1200 subscriptions in Europe and the United States. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives and embraces the diversity and dynamics of a dialogic and comparatist understanding of American Studies. It covers all areas of American Studies from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Special-topics issues alternate with regular ones. Reviews, forums, and annual bibliographies support the international circulation of German and European scholarship in American Studies.
(https://amst.winter-verlag.de/)
Editors: Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes
Review Editor: Anke Ortlepp
Address: Amerikastudien/American Studies
Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle
Philipps-Universität Marburg
FB 10 Department of English and American Studies
Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6f
35032 Marburg, Germany
Phone: +49 6421-2824-345
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de
or
Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes
Europa-Universität Flensburg
Department of English and American Studies
Auf dem Campus 1
24943 Flensburg, Germany
E-Mail: amst@dgfa.de

» Visit Journal Web Site

Amerikastudien / American Studies 2016: Turkish-American Literature, Vol. 61, No.2

An Introduction to Turkish-American Literature

By Verena Laschinger

Cultural Ambassador from Turkey: Selma Ekrem’s Life Journey

By HANNA WALLINGER
Selma Ekrem (1902-1986) is a first-generation Turkish-American writer. Drawn by a lure of adventure, a quest for personal freedom, and a lifestyle that she did not find in Turkey, she traveled to the United States for the first time in 1924. In her early career in the United States and after the publication of her autobiography Unveiled, Ekrem adopted the role of a Turkish cultural ambassador. As an immigrant writer, she never questioned her growing Americanization, and in her frequent travels to Turkey, she demonstrated that her point of view had become increasingly American rather than Turkish. She published about 280 essays in the Christian Science Monitor, a historical and personal book called Turkey Old and New, and a book for children, Turkish Fairy Tales. This essay argues that, as an "ethnic" autobiographer and lecturer, Ekrem explains her country of origin to non-Turkish readers in her work and seeks to show them the wonders of a far-away nation and its potential for Western-style modernization. Several newspaper essays, which have only become available recently, prove that she had to follow certain rules of Orientalism in order to become a successful lecturer. An analysis of her later publications demonstrates that her undertaking of life writing continues through her essays and later books.

The Crazy Turk of New York City: Fact and Fiction in Erje Ayden’s Work

By GÖNÜL PULTAR
This essay introduces Turkish-American author Erje Ayden and his work. Both have thus far been neglected in the twenty-first century scholarship, although Ayden had been a veritable legend in Greenwich Village during his lifetime. Most of his self-published novels are being currently reissued by various publishers. This essay discusses the unique amalgam of fact and fiction they contain, focusing on The Crazy Green of Second Avenue and The Legend of Erje Ayden. It argues that his novels are ensconced within a tradition of the twentieth-century American novel, and that some reveal pioneering work in the non-fiction novel genre. Ayden is moreover able to articulate the predicament of the Turkish-American who finds him/herself situated in two different social and cultural milieus.

"Built for Europeans who came on the Orient Express": Queer Desires of Extravagant Strangers in Sinan Ünel's Pera Palas

By RALPH J. POOLE
The Pera Palace Hotel has long been a site of transnational interest. Its original intent when it was built in 1892 was to host passengers of the Orient Express, and its nickname as the "oldest European hotel of Turkey" aptly reflects this heritage. It has been the setting of Anglophone world literature, such as Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt, and, perhaps most famously, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. But the hotel also reflects Turkey's own turbulent history from Istanbul's luxurious Belle Epoque to the oftentimes nostalgic luxury of a postmodern metropolis, with Room 101 being converted into a memorial for Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, thus designating the space as museum-hotel. Pera Palas (1998), the play by Turkish-American playwright Sinan Ünel, is a complex spatio-temporal interlacing of the hotel's/nation's history with that of a Turkish family and their Anglo-American friends and lovers encompassing the 1920s via the 1950s to present time. Intermingling East and West, past and present, Islam and Christianity, traditionalists and feminists, hetero- and homosexuality, this play is at once a multifarious love story and a polyloguous diasporic tale.

“Resident Aliens”: Locating Turkish American Literature Beyond Hyphenated American Fiction

By ELENA FURLANETTO
The notion of "Turkish-American Literature" has been employed to address the work of first- and second-generation migrants that went from Turkey to the United States, such as Shirin Devrim, Selma Ekrem, and Elif Batuman. This designation characterizes Turkish American literature as fiction written by Americans of Turkish descent and collocates it within the hyphenated canon of American literature. By laying emphasis on migration and life writing as the two essential features of binational writing, scholars of this field have denied the "Turkish American" status to works in English by Turkish authors who were neither born in the United States nor resided there permanently, but nevertheless succeeded in establishing a shared Turkish American literary universe without drawing from the repertoire of the American immigrant story. Their experience in the United States was often one of comings and goings, which led them to return to and settle in Istanbul. This article argues that the label of Turkish American literature can be extended beyond the sphere of immigrant life writing to works in English that do not qualify as what is generally understood as ethnic fiction. The texts examined in this article - Hadibe Edip's autobiographical volume The Turkish Ordeal (1928), Güneli Gün's On the Road to Baghdad (1991), and Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) - qualify as Turkish American and are in fact of great relevance to American Studies because they engage in an intense dialogue with the United States on the level of form, content, and politics.

Articulating Identities around Lev Yilmaz’s “Tales of Mere Existence”

By DEFNE KARAOSMANOĞLU
Lev Yilmaz is an independent artist and publisher best known for his series of animated comics, "Tales of Mere Existence." The series began in 2002, and since then it has had more than fourty-one-million viewers on YouTube. Based on personal observations, the stories are told from a very pessimistic and sarcastic point of view, challenging conventional inter-personal and family relations. Even though the Boston-born and San Francisco-based storyteller and animator, who has a Turkish father and a Swedish mother, never claims a national identity of any sort (nor a bi-national identity such as Turkish-American or Swedish-American), his Turkish readers tend to refer to his Turkishness very often. In this paper, I analyze Yilmaz's "Tales of Mere Existence" through online audience research. First, I look at the critical discourses within the text itself and the moments of resistance therein. Then, I analyze how the English- and Turkish-speaking audiences receive texts that I call resistive, that is, texts that challenge self and society. I especially look at whether and in what ways nationality (or the absence of nationality) becomes a central issue in those interpretations. I analyze the comments shared in Turkish and English on YouTube, entries shared in Turkish urban dictionaries such as Incisözlük and Ekşisözlük and other related websites from 2002 to 2014, and try to understand how Turkishness or Turkish-Americanness is expressed and re-written in and around the text by the audience. In this paper, I employ an interdisciplinary approach that combines American studies with communication studies. In the end, I argue that there is no necessary link between the text and its interpretation. National and patriotic sentiments, inter-national solidarity, and hate towards others and the self play a crucial role in the audience's interpretations, whereas the content of the text has no intention to provoke such feelings. Therefore, in the case of this study, not the text itself, but the descent of the author is determinant in meaning production.

A Conversation with Joseph O’Neill

By CHARLTON PAYNE

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