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Nationalist Dilemmas: Halide Edib on Greeks, Greece, and the West1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
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.
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- Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2002
Footnotes
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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