Encountering the Familiarity of a Foreign Culture: Julie Dash's Novel Daughters of the Dust

Authors

  • Katharina Gerund

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.121

Abstract

This essay analyzes Julie Dash’s 1997 novel Daughters of the Dust “with regard to its portrayal of the Gullah culture, its strategies of familiarizing an outsider readership with a foreign culture, and the way it depicts representations of culture in anthropology and literature. The analysis works on two levels: it examines how intercultural encounters are portrayed in the novel as well as how the novel itself functions as “entry point“ to the Gullah culture. It argues that Dash presents cultures as distinct though not disclosed entities where boundaries can be transgressed though not transcended.

Author Biography

Katharina Gerund

Katharina Gerund, M.A. studied American Cultural Studies, Theater and Media Studies, and Psychology at the University of Erlangen as well as Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison as a DAAD fellow. Katharina has been a doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen from 2007 to 2009 and has been working as lecturer in American Studies at the University of Düsseldorf since 2009. Her main research interests include African American literature and culture, film, Americanization, processes of transatlantic cultural exchange, and (cultural) mobility. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled “Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in Germany.“

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How to Cite

Gerund, Katharina. “Encountering the Familiarity of a Foreign Culture: Julie Dash’s Novel Daughters of the Dust”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 11, Mar. 2012, doi:10.5283/copas.121.

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