This dissertation examines the discourse generated by students and teachers at an American missionary school in Constantinople (Istanbul) between 1871, the year the school was founded, and 1923, the year of the Ottoman Empire's end and the Turkish Republic's beginning. From its position as religious proselytizer in a locale that was not a Western colony, the American College for Girls (also known as Constantinople Woman's College) gradually re-presented itself as a secular, independent institution of higher learning that offered a modem education in the English language to Ottoman women of diverse religious and linguistic backgrounds. The College's re-imaging occurred in response to local conditions: although missionaries had found Protestant evangelism to be largely ineffective, many Ottoman families desired a Western education for their daughters. In addition, the American female teachers in Constantinople found intellectual and professional opportunities for their own development that they likely would not have had access to in the United States. Thus, the Americans' moderation of their religious rhetoric occurred in response to: 1) their role within the shifting objectives of the missionary movement; 2) the demands of their Ottoman clientele for a Western-style education for women; and 3) their personal desires to preserve their professional status as college-level educators. Nonetheless, in its pedagogical discourse and in its depictions of students, the College's rhetorical production exhibits racialized views of "nation" as well as an Orientalist, in Edward Said's meaning of the term, view of the school's role as Western educator. Similarly, the College's continual blurring of the designations of "race" and "nation," in which the students are always viewed within their racialized, "national" identities, exemplifies Homi Bhabha's categories of colonial ambivalence and mimicry. This dissertation, while acknowledging the American teachers' complicity in the construction and repetition of Orientalist discourse and the Ottoman students' internalization of this racializing discourse, also problematizes current postcolonial theoretical assumptions by identifying a mutuality of purpose within the discourse of the Ottoman students and the American teachers in the non-colonial but still "Oriental" late Ottoman Empire. / Department of English