Department of American Culture and Literature
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Browsing Department of American Culture and Literature by Author "Demirtürk, E. L."
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Item Open Access The making and unmaking of whiteness: Richard Wright's rite of passage(Oxford University Press, 2001) Demirtürk, E. L.Item Open Access Mastering the master's tongue: bigger as oppressor in Richard Wright's native son(Mississippi State University, 1997) Demirtürk, E. L.Part of a special issue on Richard Wright. Race is the basic element of the discourse of difference that pervades interracial relations. Wright's Native Son addresses the dire consequences of the whites' image-formation of blacks as it analyzes the role of perception in interracial relations. Stereotypical images of blacks that have been part of colonialist discourse are also part of the white stereotyping of Bigger Thomas. Bigger's violent killing of the rat in the opening scenes of the novel juxtaposes Bigger's anger with the rat's fear. Having become a murderer in order not to enact the white myth of the black rapist, Bigger is trapped by police in the closing scenes of the novel and becomes the rat whose final cry of defiance is to no avail. Unlike the rat at the beginning, however, he is able to attack both physically and mentally at the end.Item Open Access “Parodies of whiteness”: discursive frames of recognition in Percival Everett’s i am not Sidney Poitier(David Publishing Co., Inc., 2011-08) Demirtürk, E. L.The paper discusses how the white supremacist norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of black vulnerability as a precondition of the white human in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Everett’s novel depicts the extent to which popular culture plays a constitutive role in the cultural governance of black bodies, as he dismantles white hegemonic discursive processes that coerce the black body into performing whiteness. Since racialized body is a script of whiteness, it is important to note that the racial script exposes the discursive exchanges in interracial encounters. The issue of how the whites reproduce the power of whiteness in the process of “scripting” blacks is represented through Everett’s satirical discourse on the everyday white discursive practices: “Parodies of whiteness” demonstrate how the black male protagonist Not Sidney undoes the white power at the moment of the constitution of the disjunctive black self, when Sidney Poitier’s image works against the particularity of Not Sidney’s identity. Whites’ urge to “see” and “recognize” the white-commodified racial paradigm (of Poitier) in Not Sidney who fails to become one, highlights the white mechanisms of power that produce blackness except as a mere “parody of whiteness”. It is in this contradictory space that Everett enables us to confront the issue of whiteness (and of race in general) as mere parody, because everyday performances of blackness (under white policing and surveillance) are as much a parody of blackness as that of whiteness.Item Open Access The possibilities of dismantling the racializing strategies of white supremacy(Sage Publications Ltd., 2012) Demirtürk, E. L.Item Open Access Reinscribing the racial subject in “public transcript”: Richard Wright's black boy (American Hunger)(Routledge, 2005) Demirtürk, E. L.Item Open Access Revisionary reconstructions of urban spaces: claiming the barrio as “homely” site in Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda(David Publishing Co., Inc., 2011-09) Demirtürk, E. L.Although ghetto fiction is concerned with the geographical peripheries of white metropolis, its long-term strategy is to effect a radical restructuring of cityscape. This is not to state a criticism of neocolonial values upon which the city is built in opposition to the ghetto but rather of demonstrating the extent to which the white city and the ghetto are already deeply implicated within each other. In a ghetto novel, the white city is the subtext that we must recover, because history of ghetto formation itself is the subject of its discourse. Revaluation of the ghetto prepares us for later attempts to revive an urban and “ghettocentric” American identity. In contrast to some ghetto fiction where the ghetto is denounced as a place adverse to emancipatory “progress”, Nicholasa Mohr’s literary ghetto in Nilda (1986) is not a narrative reinforcing the stereotypical representations of how racioethnic urban life and violent crime define each other. It is not, in other words, a location of unproblematic inherited identities but a place where orientations and identifications are negotiated.Item Open Access Teaching African-American literature in Turkey: the politics of pedagogy(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) Demirtürk, E. L.Item Open Access Writing the urban discourse into the black ghetto imaginary: Louise Meriwether's daddy was a number runner(The University of North Carolina Press, 2006) Demirtürk, E. L.