Imagining Arab Womanhood

A fascinating demonstration of how U.S. representations of veils, harems, and belly dancers have operated as nostalgic and exotic symbols to help rationalize dominant U.S. narratives about power and progress.

A fascinating demonstration of how U.S. representations of veils, harems, and belly dancers have operated as nostalgic and exotic symbols to help rationalize dominant U.S. narratives about power and progress.

A fascinating demonstration of how U.S. representations of veils, harems, and belly dancers have operated as nostalgic and exotic symbols to help rationalize dominant U.S. narratives about power and progress.

The discourse of Arab women speaking out, refusing to be silent, and voicing their experiences, is alive and ever-growing. Arab Women Voice New Realities presents an archive of living, breathing stories of women making promises and confessions, women coming to terms with traumatic pasts, negotiating complex present realities, and imagining alternative liberating futures. This collection attempts to bridge the gap among women writers, seasoned and novice. It spans a large geographical space, uncovers the depth of distinct experiences, and ultimately offers a platform for voice and visibility to the new Arab woman. These stories are instantiations, records, and they will never be told in the same way again. Seldom do we get the chance to see a literary project through in a relatively short period of time, especially one which involves many writers, translators, artists, designers and publishing members.

A curious figure stalks the pages of a distinct subset of mass-market romance novels, aptly called “desert romances.” Animalistic yet sensitive, dark and attractive, the desert prince or sheikh emanates manliness and raw, sexual power. In the years since September 11, 2001, the sheikh character has steadily risen in popularity in romance novels, even while depictions of Arab masculinity as backward and violent in nature have dominated the cultural landscape. An Imperialist Love Story contributes to the broader conversation about the legacy of orientalist representations of Arabs in Western popular culture. Combining close readings of novels, discursive analysis of blogs and forums, and interviews with authors, Jarmakani explores popular investments in the war on terror by examining the collisions between fantasy and reality in desert romances. Focusing on issues of security, freedom, and liberal multiculturalism, she foregrounds the role that desire plays in contemporary formations of U.S. imperialism. Drawing on transnational feminist theory and cultural studies, An Imperialist Love Story offers a radical reinterpretation of the war on terror, demonstrating romance to be a powerful framework for understanding how it works, and how it perseveres.

For the first time, Arab women researchers perform field work in their own societies and discuss the experience. As a group, they also provide an excellent overview of the issues involved in a number of different Arab communities: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and a Bedouin community in the Egyptian Western Desert.

This book assesses the contribution of women to the Arabic novel, both in subject matter and form. It begins by tracing the struggle over women's rights in the Arab world, particularly the gradual improvement in women's access to education—the first area in which women made significant gains. Subsequent chapters discuss Arab women writers' remarkable talents and determination to overcome the barriers of a male-dominated culture; survey the 1950s and 1960s, during which women's writing gained momentum and more women writers emerged; and address the shift in emphasis and attitude that women's literature underwent in the late 1960s, especially following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when women novelists began to place more stress on international politics. Zeidan adapts Western-based feminist literary theory to a discussion of Arab women's literature but refrains from imposing that theory inappropriately on literature whose context differs significantly. He compares the women's movements in Arab and Western cultures and the development of women's literature in those cultures, and uses these comparisons to highlight similarities and differences between them as well as to consider how one affected the other. His analysis culminates in the early 1980s—the end of the formative years—when women's writing had become a familiar part of Arabic literature in general and a positive reflection on the collective Arab consciousness.

Four Maghribine folktales, adapted and translated.