Introduction

A NUMBER OF TURKISH GERMAN women writers recently have carved out a niche in popular literature with autobiographically inflected accounts of their lives as modern, transnational subjects, often framed in criticism as a variant of “ethnic chick lit.” Light-hearted autobiographical novels by authors such as Hatice Akyun, Iris Alanyalı, and Hülya Özkan have presented Turkish German women's lives in ways that are appealing and accessible for young female readers. Scholarship on this popular genre has either condemned it for its perpetuation of orientalizing stereotypes or praised the genre's subtle critical agenda. What has not been considered so far is a number of recent Turkish travelogues by Turkish German women writers. Drawing on many of the conventions of chick lit, these works might be considered a kind of “chick travel”; like the former, they both reinforce and at times challenge gendered and cultural stereotypes. In choosing Turkey as the object of their travel narratives, these writers invoke readerly expectations of authenticity and access, expectations they are often unable to meet. The writers of Turkish German chick travel negotiate generic conventions and readerly expectations with varying degrees of deftness, but their work is a notable intervention in mainstream representations of Turkish German hybridity. As a genre that has historically perpetuated the rhetoric of empire, travel writing has recently given voice to “a new generation of cultural and literary critics” that “has begun to identify alternative representations of travel and to challenge Eurocentric understandings of the genre.” The following discussion of Turkish German women's travelogues aims to highlight these two aspects of this nascent genre, namely its indebtedness to, as well as perpetuation of, colonialist discourse, and its potential to challenge long-standing Orientalist notions of others.

This chapter will consider four works of chick travel written since 2006.