Dissident Writings Of Arab Women

Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence analyzes the links between creative dissidence and inscriptions of violence in the writings of a selected group of postcolonial Arab women. The female authors destabilize essentialist framings of Arab identity through a series of reflective interrogations and "contesting" literary genres that include novels, short stories, poetry, docudramas, interviews and testimonials. Rejecting a purist "literature for literature’s sake" ethic, they embrace a dissident poetics of feminist critique and creative resistance as they engage in multiple and intergenerational border crossings in terms of geography, subject matter, language and transnationality. This book thus examines the ways in which the women’s writings provide the blueprint for social justice by "voicing" protest and stimulating critical thought, particularly in instances of social oppression, structural violence, and political transition. Providing an interdisciplinary approach which goes beyond narrow definitions of literature as aesthetic praxis to include literature’s added value as a social, historical, political, and cultural palimpsest, this book will be a useful resource for students and scholars of North African Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Francophone Studies, and Feminist Studies.

This volume carefully assesses fixed notions of Arab womanhood by exploring the complexities of Arab women’s lives as portrayed in literature. Encompassing women writers and critics from Arab, French, and English traditions, it forges a transnational Arab feminist consciousness. Brinda Mehta examines the significance of memory rituals in women’s writings, such as the importance of water and purification rites in Islam and how these play out in the women’s space of the hammam (Turkish bath). Mehta shows how sensory experiences connect Arab women to their past. Specific chapters raise awareness of the experiences of Palestinian women in exile and under occupation, Bedouin and desert rituals, and women’s views on conflict in Iraq and Lebanon, and the compatibility between Islam and feminism. At once provocative and enlightening, this work is a groundbreaking addition to the timely field of modern Arab women’s writing and criticism and Arab literary studies.

The public image of Arabs in America has been radically affected by the 'war on terror'. But stereotypes of Arabs, manifested for instance in Orientalist representations of Sheherazade and the Arabian Nights in Hollywood, have prevailed for much longer. Here Somaya Sabry argues that the Arab-American experience has been powerfully shaped by racial discourse and Orientalism, and is further complicated today by hostility towards Arabs in post-9/11 America. She shows how Arab-American women writers and performers confront and subvert racial stereotypes in this charged context by recasting representations of Sheherazade. Shedding new light on Arab-American women's negotiations of identity, this book will be indispensable for all those interested in the Arab-American world, American ethnic studies and race, as well as diaspora studies, women's studies, literature, cultural studies and performance studies.

This book examines the ways in which women in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa have re-imagined revolutionary discourses through creativity and collective action as a means of resistance. Encompassing a stunning array of forms and genres, such as graffiti, street performance, photography, phototexts, novels, and comics, the book draws from a vast spectrum of artistic production in revolutionary periods between 2011 and 2022 in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. El Nossery sheds light on women’s postrevolutionary artistic output by engaging an interdisciplinary approach: the book is divided into three sections which foreground the unique relationship between textual, visual, and performative modes as they intertwine with art and politics. Arab Women’s Revolutionary Art thereby aims to demonstrate how art, as always oriented towards an open future, can preserve the revolutionary spirit that was sparked in 2011 by documenting what happened and determining which stories would be told. The revolution, therefore, continues.

An account of dissidence in Hafiz Asads Syria, describing how intellectuals tried to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it.

14. The politics of perception in post-revolutionaryEgyptian cinema -- Reel revolutions -- Notes -- Bibliography -- PART III: Text -- 15. Teaching the maqâmât in translation -- Maqâmât and translation -- Teaching the maqâmât -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 16. Ibn Hazm: Friendship, love and the quest for justice -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 17. The Story of Zahra and its critics: Feminism and agency at war -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 18. The Arabic frametale and two European offspring -- Introduction -- The 1001 Nights -- The Book of Kalīla wa-Dimna -- The Maqāmāt -- The Book of Good Love -- The Canterbury Tales -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 19. Teaching the Arabian Nights -- The fourteenth-century manuscript -- The translator as producer -- A translation venture in a classroom -- Galland's translation in context -- Entry into the French milieu -- The twentieth century: how different? -- In world literature: a comparative sketch before and after -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Afterword: Teaching Arabic literature, Columbia University, May 2010 -- Index

Texts act like receptacles for an ever-present remembered past, or what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur calls “the present representation of an absent thing”. They might embody an efficient remedy to forgetting but could also become a vivid testimony for exorcised traumas. This volume focuses on Ricœur’s phenomenology of memory, epistemology of history, and hermeneutics of forgetting. A special emphasis is laid on the dissension between individual and collective institutional memory.

The first book to trace the female pioneers of Arab documentary filmmakingIn spite of harsh censorship, conservative morals and a lack of investment, women documentarists in the Arab world have found ways to subtly negotiate dissidence in their films, something that is becoming more apparent since the aArab Revolutions. In this book, Stefanie Van de Peer traces the very beginnings of Arab women making documentaries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the 1970s and 1980s in Egypt and Lebanon, to the 1990s and 2000s in Morocco and Syria.Supporting a historical overview of the documentary form in the Arab world with a series of in-depth case studies, Van de Peer looks at the work of pioneering figures like Ateyyat El Abnoudy, the amother of Egyptian documentary, Tunisias Selma Baccar and the Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri. Addressing the context of the films production, distribution and exhibition, the book also asks why these women held on to the ideals of a type of filmmaking that was unlikely to be accepted by the censor, and looks at precisely how the women documentarists managed to frame expressions of dissent with the tools available to the documentary maker.Case studies include:Egypt's Ateyyat El AbnoudyLebanon's Jocelyne Saab Algeria's Assia DjebarTunisia's Selma Baccar Palestine's Mai MasriMorocco's Izza GA(c)nini Syria's Hala Alabdallah Yakoub