Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
American Studies Asssociation of Turkey 38th International American Studies Conference, Ankara, Türkiye, 1 - 03 Kasım 2017, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.9
Eartha Kitt often felt and openly wrote that she was a loner who had no family, nobody to return to, nowhere to go, and nothing to do in the US. That’s why, as many agree including herself, she traveled so much all around the world just to get away from the pain the US irrevocably pumped into every moment of her career as an artist. In her autobiographies, she expressed her constant struggle just to exist while the odds against her were too much to handle. In the US, she was loved as an artist. At the same time, the CIA persecuted her for her radicalism characterized by her speaking freely against racism and militarism as a multilingual and multiracial civil rights activist. Despite all hardships, Eartha was still having fun, especially during her travels. In her autobiographies, while she mostly associated the US with loneliness and feeling of hurt, the remedy for her suffering was travelling to “exotic” places including Turkey where there were new cultures to experience. In this presentation, the emotional roots and artistic repercussions of her travels are explored with a focus on how Eartha’s travels resembled her swinging personal mood, toing and froing between love and hate, a perpetual mode that filled an artist who, in her own words, didn’t “really exist.”