1st Edition
Memory, Voice, and Identity Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East
Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899–1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923–1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.
Chapter 1:
Memory of Latifa al-Zayyat between Influence and Ambivalence
Magda Mansour Hasabelnaby
Chapter 2:
Rebuilding Baghdad: Placing Memoir in the Archive in Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon (2007) and Tamara Chalabi’s Late for Tea at the Deer Palace (2010)
Arththi Sathananthar
Chapter 3:
Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem: Re-memory and the Storied Geography of Subalterns’ Telling of their S/Place
Riham Debian
Chapter 4:
"Don’t Get in my Face Like Ashiq Peri": The Legacy of Azerbaijan’s most Famous Woman Bard
Anna C. Oldfield
Chapter 5:
"Exilic Consciousness": Memoirs of Iranian Women Émigrés
Feroza Jussawalla
Chapter 6:
Feminist Ethnography, Revisionary Historiography and the Subaltern in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade
Naila Sahar
Section 2: Body and Politics
Chapter 7:
Spheres of Piety: Politicization of Muslim Women in Turkish Novels
Funda Güven
Chapter 8:
Muslim Face, White Mask: Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah’s Ramza as a Mimic (Wo)man
Doaa Omran
Chapter 9:
Same-sex Relations in Modern Arabic Fiction between Empowerment and Impossibility: A case study of Samar Yazbek’s Cinnamon
Rima Sadek
Chapter 10:
Writing Veiled Bodies Anew: A Study of Maya al-Haj’s Burkini: Iʿtirāfāt□Muḥajjaba.
Asmaa Gamal Salem Awad
Section 3: Identity and Crossing Boundaries
Chapter 11:
"A Girl is Like a Bottle of Coke": Emptied and Recycled Identities in Always Coca-Cola
Lava Asaad
Chapter 12:
Shaping a Female Identity: Feminism & National Identity in Suad al-Sabah’s Poetry
Asmaa Ahmed Youssef Moawad
Chapter 13:
"An Islam of her Own": A Critical Reading of Leila Aboulela’s Minaret
Wafaa H. Sorour
Chapter 14:
Mobility, Survival, and the Female Body in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
Amel Abbady
Section 4: Moving to Wider Spheres
Chapter 15:
An Intersectional Feminist Reading of The Dove’s Necklace and Hend and the Soldiers
Najlaa R. Aldeeb
Chapter 16:
Language and Identity in Postcolonial Mauritanian Muslim Women’s Writing
Fatima Sidiya
Chapter 17:
Documenting Refugee Crisis and Post-migration Living Difficulties in Ebtissam Shakoush’s In the Camps and Social Media Representations: A Postcolonial Perspective
Heba Gaber Abd Elaziz
Section 5: Returning to the Scheherazade Within
Chapter 18:
Djebar and Scheherazade: On Muslim Women, Past and Present
Brigitte Stepanov
Chapter 19:
Cultural Trauma and Scheherazade’s Gastro-national/Transnational Discourse in Tamara al-Refai’s Writings
Pervine Elrefaei
Chapter 20:
Revolutionizing Scheherazade: Deconstructing the Exotic and Oppressed Muslim Odalisque in Mohja Kahf’s Poetry
Amany El-Sawy
Biography
Feroza Jussawalla has taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and is Full Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1984), co-editor of Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World, (1992), and ed., Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (1997), and Emerging South Asian Women Writers (2017).
Doaa Omran did her Master’s and PhD at the University of New Mexico (2019). She wrote her ground-breaking dissertation titled Female Hero Mega-Archetypes in the Medieval European Romance on Quranic and Biblical female characters as mega-archetypes in Medieval literature. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the same university where she received her Master’s and doctorate. She received her BA in English language and literature at Alexandria University, Egypt. Her awards include: a Fulbright Scholarship (2007), the Women of Color award at UNM (2012), Dean of Graduate Studies Dissertation Award (2016) and first place in the Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship (2018). Her essay "Anachronism and Anatopism in the French Vulgate Cycle and the Forging of English Identity through Othering Muslims/Saracens" is included in Albrecht Classen’s edited volume Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation (2018).