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Nationalist Dilemmas: Halide Edib on Greeks, Greece, and the West1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Cornelia (Corinna) A. Tsakiridou*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, La Salle University

Extract

      O College dear, we praise thee
      For pointing to the stars
      With faith and hope unswerving
      Which no weak vision mars
      Thy service unrestricted
      By race or class or creed;
      Thy love so freely offered,
      Its only claim-our need.
      -Anthem of the American College for Girls, Istanbul

Halide Edib (1883-1964) was one of modern Turkey's most celebrated women. Author, feminist, nationalist, modernist, educator, and member of the National Assembly, she identified her person and career with the transformation of Turkey into a modern secular republic. Educated in the internationalist spirit of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, she was, throughout her life, a cosmopolitan intellectual with an international audience. Edib's personal transition from Ottoman society to the new nationalist elite, and her homeland's transition from empire to republic, posed no insurmountable historical, social, and cultural discontinuities; hers was a nationalism that, although grounded in Western notions of emancipation and self-determination, asserted with confidence its distinct identity and autonomy from the West.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2002

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Footnotes

1

In loving memory of my aunt, Tjeny G. Gavriilidou (1934-2000) and of my grandmother, Vasiliki Dosopoulou Gavriilidou (1910-1999), once of Istanbul. I would like to thank Stephen Breedlove, Reference Librarian at the La Salle University Connelly Library, for his generous assistance with interlibrary resources.

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