A Bridge Over the Balkans

This book is a critical study of Demetra Vaka Brown, one of the most significant Greek American writers of the turn of the last century, framed within the fields of “Orientalism” and cultural studies. Offering an overview of her life and career with analytical readings of her major works, the book’s focus is on the role of Vaka Brown as cultural agent: at once a white female and an immigrant of Greek descent and a former citizen of Ottoman Turkey who worked as a journalist and author in the United States, writing in English and contributing her work to mainstream publications. The book presents the identity and spatial politics of Vaka Brown, recovering the discursive techniques employed in her identification processes and assessing the significance of her cultural agency in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations of the Orientalist tradition. Vaka Brown is further examined as a case study which provides historically informed and cultural perspectives on the complexities and ambiguities of women’s imperial positionings at the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in the East and West. By exploring the author’s predicament in constructing an authorial and narrative identity in the interstices between the East and the West, modernity and tradition, ethnicity and nationalism, the book articulates a nuanced historical and cultural reading of Vaka Brown’s writing and ultimately probes the alternative responses Vaka Brown’s texts offer to the “scaffoldings” of nationalism.