YONCA DENIZARSLANI
Assist. Prof. Dr. Yonca Denizarslanı received her M.A. (2003) and Ph.D. (2010) degrees from Ege University, Department of American Culture and Literature. Her M.A. dissertation is “Modernity in American Literature: Three Lives / Gertrude Stein, The Sun Also Rises / Ernest Hemingway, Winesburg, Ohio / Sherwood Anderson, Sartoris / William Faulkner” and her Ph.D. dissertation is “Narratives of Self: Autobiography in Contemporary American Literature.” Between 2001 and 2015, she was a Research Assistant at Ege University, Department of American Culture and Literature. She has been an Assistant Professor at Ege University, Faculty of Letters, Department of American Culture and Literature since 2015. During the academic year of 2017-2018, she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Department of History for her Post-Doctoral Research Project, which is entitled as “Bodies Scribed / Textual and Corporal Representations of Authority and Transgression: Religious and Political Symbolism of Criminality and Corporal Punishments in Early Colonial New England.” Her areas of interest are American novel and autobiography, early modern European history of science and philosophy, Reformation history, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries New England colonial legal history and culture, trans-Atlantic slavery, United States history, Southern Louisiana Cajun-Creole culture and literature, classical studies, mythology, Judeo-Christian history, contemporary literature, Post-Structuralism and Post-Colonialism.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Ayse Lahur Kirtunc, Prof. Dr. Atilla Silku, Prof. Dr. Joyce E. Chaplin
Address: Ege University
Faculty of Letters
Department of American Culture and Literature
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Ayse Lahur Kirtunc, Prof. Dr. Atilla Silku, Prof. Dr. Joyce E. Chaplin
Address: Ege University
Faculty of Letters
Department of American Culture and Literature
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Papers by YONCA DENIZARSLANI
Keywords
Solus ipse / Solipsism, William Faulkner, American South, Reconstruction, Progressivism, Great Depression
Beliefs, identity and memory in Southern Louisiana Creole culture
Abstract
Southern Louisiana has been a meeting point for Mediterranean, African and Latin American cultures, transferred from the Caribbean region, since the beginning of transatlantic colonialism by the fifteenth century. As a reminiscence of the Catholic-Creole culture inherited from French and Spanish colonialism, its peculiar social stratification has shaped Southern Louisiana as a unique cultural region of the United States with its hybridized race codes and beliefs related to its local identity. Following its incorporation into U.S. borders in 1803, the region came under the domain of Anglo-Protestant American identity. Thenceforth, Southern Louisiana shared similar socio-economic aspects with other regions of the American South, such as its agricultural economy based on slavery up to the Antebellum period, and its consequent offshoots of strict social stratification, oligarchic political traditions, and racism. Nevertheless, with its Catholic-Creole heritage of earlier French and Spanish colonialism, Southern Louisiana persists as a unique marginal local identity even in today’s state of Louisiana. Stemming from its Portuguese root criulo, which means ‘native,’ the definition of Creole was initially used in the sixteenth century to identify the second-generation European colonial population in the New World. In this respect, with its inference of cultural distance and detachment between the colonies and their European metropoles, the definition of Creole was also inclusive of a rhetorical representation of a potential political threat. Later on, as an outcome of transatlantic slavery in New World colonies, the definition of Creole was used to identify the hierarchic category between the African slaves and the second-generation slaves born in the Americas. In due course, mixed social relations among the European, African and Native American colonial populations in Southern and Central America transformed the definition of Creole into a concept of racial and cultural hybridization. Thus, as an authentic cultural identity, today’s concept of Creole has become a means for the revival and survival of the cultural alterities identified with contemporary Southern Louisiana, including local beliefs, identities and memories, as an alternative cultural space to the domain of main-stream Anglo-American identity and political power in the United States. This article focuses on Southern Louisiana Creole beliefs, identity and local memory with reference to Jewel Parker Rhodes’s novel Voodoo Dreams (1993) and Mona Lisa Saloy’s poems from her book Red Beans And Ricely Yours (2005).
Keywords: Southern Louisiana, Creole, Anglo-American, Colonialism, and transatlantic slavery.
Book Reviews by YONCA DENIZARSLANI
Keywords
Solus ipse / Solipsism, William Faulkner, American South, Reconstruction, Progressivism, Great Depression
Beliefs, identity and memory in Southern Louisiana Creole culture
Abstract
Southern Louisiana has been a meeting point for Mediterranean, African and Latin American cultures, transferred from the Caribbean region, since the beginning of transatlantic colonialism by the fifteenth century. As a reminiscence of the Catholic-Creole culture inherited from French and Spanish colonialism, its peculiar social stratification has shaped Southern Louisiana as a unique cultural region of the United States with its hybridized race codes and beliefs related to its local identity. Following its incorporation into U.S. borders in 1803, the region came under the domain of Anglo-Protestant American identity. Thenceforth, Southern Louisiana shared similar socio-economic aspects with other regions of the American South, such as its agricultural economy based on slavery up to the Antebellum period, and its consequent offshoots of strict social stratification, oligarchic political traditions, and racism. Nevertheless, with its Catholic-Creole heritage of earlier French and Spanish colonialism, Southern Louisiana persists as a unique marginal local identity even in today’s state of Louisiana. Stemming from its Portuguese root criulo, which means ‘native,’ the definition of Creole was initially used in the sixteenth century to identify the second-generation European colonial population in the New World. In this respect, with its inference of cultural distance and detachment between the colonies and their European metropoles, the definition of Creole was also inclusive of a rhetorical representation of a potential political threat. Later on, as an outcome of transatlantic slavery in New World colonies, the definition of Creole was used to identify the hierarchic category between the African slaves and the second-generation slaves born in the Americas. In due course, mixed social relations among the European, African and Native American colonial populations in Southern and Central America transformed the definition of Creole into a concept of racial and cultural hybridization. Thus, as an authentic cultural identity, today’s concept of Creole has become a means for the revival and survival of the cultural alterities identified with contemporary Southern Louisiana, including local beliefs, identities and memories, as an alternative cultural space to the domain of main-stream Anglo-American identity and political power in the United States. This article focuses on Southern Louisiana Creole beliefs, identity and local memory with reference to Jewel Parker Rhodes’s novel Voodoo Dreams (1993) and Mona Lisa Saloy’s poems from her book Red Beans And Ricely Yours (2005).
Keywords: Southern Louisiana, Creole, Anglo-American, Colonialism, and transatlantic slavery.