Born as a Greek Ottoman in Constantinople/Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. Her first book, Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Oriental Women, published in 1909, was based on experiences from 1901, when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances. On the one hand, Haremlik is nostalgic for the Ottoman life that was rapidly disappearing, and on the other hand, its author enjoys the freedoms of a professional American woman. Tracing the emergence of a modern sensibility among Muslim women, Haremlik also reveals the predicament Vaka Brown faced in constructing an authorial and narrative identity in the interstices between East and West, modernity, and tradition.

Yiorgos Kalogeras is Professor of English in the School of Philosophy, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Cultures in Dialogue returns to print sources by women writers from the East and West. Series One considers the exchanges between Ottoman, British, and American women from the 1880s to the 1940s. Their varied responses to dilemmas such as nationalism, female emancipation, race relations, and modernization in the context of the stereotypes characteristic of Western harem literature, reframe the historical tensions between Eastern and Western cultures, offering a nuanced understanding of their current manifestations.

Series Editors:

Teresa Heffernan is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
Reina Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London, UK.

Reviews

"Each woman Vaka's narrator encounters represents a distinct Orientalist situation, thus denoting a plurality of referents for the Oriental female. Vaka's Orientalist examples illustrate Orientalism as a nexus of various modes of representation. In both books, the series of observations that Vaka's autobiographical narrator makes about women in Turkey resist and challenge the notion of a closed Orientalist discourse that has the potential to manage and colonize the 'otherness' of the 'Eastern lady.' Subsequently, Haremlik and The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul, as hereby discussed, undermine the notion of an oversimplified, consistent, univocal Orientalist discourse that effectively produces 'cultural differences.'"--Eleftheria Arapoglou, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora

"Vaka Brown constantly sets off attitudes heard in her adopted country from those in her country of birth, using this 'dialogue' to probe at stereotypes."--Dr. Marilyn Booth, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Table of Contents

• Introduction to the Series
• Introduction to the Reprint: Contested, Familiar and Exotic Spaces: The Politics of Demetra Vaka Brown's Identity
• Coming Home to Turkey
• Mihirima
• Djimlah, The Thinker, Selim Pasha's Fourth Wife
• Validé Hanoum, The Resigned First Wife
• The Gift-Wife From the Sultan's Palace
• Houlmé Hanoum, The Discontented
• Suffragettes of the Harem
• The Love of Nor-Sembah and Hakif Bey
• A Day's Entertainment in the Harem
• A Flight From the Harem