Identities in Motion: Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives as Life Writing

This article examines two travel narratives by two Ottoman women: Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913) by Zeyneb Hanoum in order to understand how they represented themselves in a well-established field of harem literature. I ask how they constructed their autobiographical subjectivity. In their representation of life at home we see how memory interacts with the processes of identification and differentiation to illuminate the authors’ textual autobiographical subjectivity. I focus on three topics that both texts emphasize: education, life in the harem, and political participation. The narrators’ commentaries on these topics at times coincide, but more often are in conflict and reveal much about the relationship between their location, the historical moment, and their evolving autobiographical personas.