| This thesis examines the work of the first Turkish American writer Selma Ekrem's autobiography Unveiled in search of answer to the question: "How did Turkish women handle the way they were perceived by Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, after an era of Orientalist thinking in America?" Using history, literature, and film, my thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine the representations and positioning of "Turks" in both visual and literary texts produced in the 1920s and 1930s in America. Drawing upon historiography, narratology, feminist theories of autobiography and various literary and cultural theories, this thesis examines a Turkish woman's social imagination and creative modes of representing and thinking about boundaries of race, gender and nationalism in America while demonstrating the openness of individual identifications based on Ekrem's hybrid articulation of her identity which hampers essentialist constructions. |
