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Main headings: American studies from an international American studies perspective. - International, transnational, hemispheric America. - American social, ethical, and religious mentalisties. - Comparative perspectives, literary counterpoints. - American identities. - Space and place in American studies.
Turkey has witnessed significant social, cultural, and political change over the last decades. This transformation has manifested itself in all segments of society and resulted in the alteration of political ideologies and institutions. The twelve authors of this volume shed light on the complexities of a changing Turkey through an interdisciplinary perspective. Their application of novel conceptual approaches and methodologies make this book a unique contribution to the study of modern Turkey.
Turkey and the United States have been critically important to each other since the beginning of the Cold War. The history of Turkish-American relations includes not only strategic, but also political, social, cultural and intellectual dimensions. While critical to understanding Turkish-American relations, these dimensions rarely surface in today’s discourse, which reduces bilateral relations to issues currently being contested. In reality, the encounter between East and West embodied in Turkish-American interactions ranges from the official and diplomatic, to unofficial and informal exchanges at the social and individual level; while often compatible and friendly, such interactions occasi...
The Christian church was born in the Middle East and grew there for centuries. Its interaction with Islam turned Christianity in this once predominantly Christian region into a marginalized jewel, surviving at great peril within a difficult, even sometimes hostile, political and religious climate. Of course, the story of Christianity over the last 1,300 years is not solely one of conflict, marginalization, and persecution but is also about accommodation, interchange, and cooperation. This introductory book details the history of the church in its Middle Eastern birthplace through the past two thousand years. It is a story described as “a lost history” by Philip Jenkins, but it is here uncovered and placed on display. For those with eyes to see, the church of the Middle East is here revealed as a precious jewel, still catching the light.
Based on a medieval extrabiblical Christian legend, the figure of the Wandering Jew has long served as a negative representation of all Jews. Condemned by Christ to endless wandering and everlasting life, the Wandering Jew has lived on ever since in literature and criticism as a legendary and symbolic paradigm, ranging from anti-Jewish stereotype to the generalized cultural Other. While Romanticism took him outside of the Jewish context, nineteenth-century antisemitic racism again adopted the figure in an evolving discourse that culminated in his image in Nazi propaganda as the despicable, racialized cultural Other who needed to be exterminated. The present work takes up this trope in all it...
This collection of essays and poems examines various recent literary texts and cultural arenas in North America and the Asia and Pacific regions for what they reveal of the ongoing struggles of indigenous people and people of colour for justice and autonomy.
Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into...
This groundbreaking series of essays offers new insights into Turkish cultures both past and present. Moving beyond the traditional binaries of east/west, Islam/secularism, and Europe/Asia, the book contains a variety of perspectives on contemporary Turkey, from actors, directors, critics and other major cultural figures. The book tries to situate these opinions in context by looking at how such perspectives are employed in different cultural spheres—education, theatre, politics and the like. Exploring Turkish Cultures contains the first major interviews published in English with prominent public figures, including actors Türkân Şoray, Genco Erkal and Nesrin Kazankaya. Other figures int...
Aside from the occasional controversy over "Official English" campaigns, language remains the blind spot in the debate over multiculturalism. Considering its status as a nation of non-English speaking aborigines and of immigrants with many languages, America exhibits a curious tunnel vision about cultural and literary forms that are not in English. How then have non-English speaking Americans written about their experiences in this country? And what can we learn-about America, immigration and ethnicity-from them? Arguing that multilingualism is perhaps the most important form of diversity, Multilingual America calls attention to-and seeks to correct-the linguistic parochialism that has defin...
During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland's reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it. By introducing these varied and forgotten works into the scholarly discussion, Traitors and True Poles recasts the literary landscape to include the immigrant community’s own competing visions of itself. The conversation between Polonia’s creative voices...