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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.
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.
In a time when it seems that the gap of understanding between the West and the Middle East continues to widen, Scheherazade's Legacy builds a bridge between the two cultures. Collected here are the voices of those who define the genre of Arab Anglophone writing—that literature that describes the cultural experiences of those with Arab identities living, and often writing, in the West. Contributions from such writers as Naomi Shihab Nye, Diana Abu-Jaber, Suheir Hammad, Etal Adnan, Elmaz Abinader, and others, explore the complexities of writing in and for a culture not entirely their own. The essays here, complemented by selections, mostly original, of each author's work, promises to be a cornerstone in the study of writing by women writers of Arab descent who find themselves between two cultures, two worlds that are often at odds. With a foreword by Barbara Nimri Aziz, journalist, and founder of RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers), this collection is one of the first books to assemble the voices of women writers of Arab descent on the subject of writing itself. Contributors consider the difficulties, obstacles, joys, failures and successes of writing from an Arab perspective but largely for American audiences. They consider aspects of identity, family, politics, memory, and other crucial cultural issues that impact them personally and professionally as writers. In creative and thoughtful prose, these important women writers shed new light on what it means to be a writer in a world not fully your own.
Arab American women have played an essential role in shaping their homes, their communities, and their country for centuries. Their contributions, often marginalized academically and culturally, are receiving long- overdue attention with the emerging interdisciplinary field of Arab American women’s studies. The collected essays in this volume capture the history and significance of Arab American women, addressing issues of migration, transformation, and reformation as these women invented occupations, politics, philosophies, scholarship, literature, arts, and, ultimately, themselves. Arab American women brought culture and absorbed culture; they brought relationships and created relationships; they brought skills and talents and developed skills and talents. They resisted inequities, refused compliance, and challenged representation. They engaged in politics, civil society, the arts, education, the market, and business. And they told their own stories. These histories, these genealogies, these narrations that are so much a part of the American experiment are chronicled in this volume, providing an indispensable resource for scholars and activists.
Evelyn Shakir’s witty, wise, and beautifully written memoir explores her status as an Arab American woman, from the subtle bigotry she faced in Massachusetts as a second-generation Lebanese whose parents were not only foreign but eccentric, to the equally poignant blend of dislocation and homecoming she felt in Bahrain, Syria, and Lebanon, where she taught American literature to university students. She effortlessly combines personal anecdote with cultural, political, and historical background, and is incapable of stereotyped thinking: one of the book’s many pleasures is the diversity she finds among the people she encounters in the Middle East, including not only students, but cab drivers, storekeepers, and the guys who make the spinach pies at the bakery down the street from her apartment. As Shakir explores her own identity, she leads the reader to an appreciation of the richness and complexity of being Arab American (or any mixed heritage) in an increasingly small world.
Arab women's writing in the modern age began with 'A'isha al-Taymuriya, Warda al-Yaziji, Zaynab Fawwaz, and other nineteenth-century pioneers in Egypt and the Levant. This unique study-first published in Arabic in 2004-looks at the work of those pioneers and then traces the development of Arab women's literature through the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a meticulously researched, comprehensive bibliography of writing by Arab women. In the first section, in nine essays that cover the Arab Middle East from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Yemen, critics and writers from the Arab world examine the origin and evolution of women's writing in each country in the region, addressing fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiographical writing. The second part of the volume contains bibliographical entries for over 1,200 Arab women writers from the last third of the nineteenth century through 1999. Each entry contains a short biography and a bibliography of each author's published works. This section also includes Arab women's writing in French and English, as well as a bibliography of works translated into English. With its broad scope and extensive research, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Arabic literature, women's studies, or comparative literature. Contributors: Emad Abu Ghazi, Radwa Ashour, Mohammed Berrada, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Subhi Hadidi, Haydar Ibrahim, Yumna al-'Id, Su'ad al-Mani', Iman al-Qadi, Amina Rachid, Huda al-Sadda, Hatim al-Sakr.
This dissertation focuses on contemporary literature produced by Arab American women authors. My study utilizes the works of Diana Abu-Jaber, Mohja Kahf, Suheir Hammad, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Laila Halaby, to raise questions about the processes, methods, and practices of writing, publishing, and reading Arab American women's literature. Influenced by developments in contemporary Arab American studies, postcolonial, and reception theories, this dissertation examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, novels, poetry, prose, and online articles that these authors produced in the aftermath of the First Gulf War until today (1993-2007). A study of this literature, I argue, facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the history of Arab American literature, its recent trends, and possible futures. Chapter Two focuses on the work of Diana Abu-Jaber, one of the most important Arab American women authors today. Tracing literary developments, shifts, and alterations in the author's work, I argue that Abu-Jaber uses her writing to humanize Arab Americans for her predominantly western audiences. Focusing on what I see as shifts in the author's political commitments and ideals, I analyze her large body of works in order to understand how they are influenced by the western publication industry, marketing strategies, reader demand, and literary fame. Chapter Three deals explicitly with the works of Mohja Kahf as I examine the author's attempt to reconfigure Islam's negative status in the United States by defying the politics of literary representation and challenging the restrictive cultural, racial, and religious boundaries of the Muslim ummah or community. I argue that the author's work challenges both the mythologies of representations surrounding the figure of the Muslim woman in the West and the gendered and sometimes exclusionary parameters of the Muslim ummah in the United States. In Chapter Four, I shift my focus to the writings of Naomi Shihab Nye, Suheir Hammad, and Laila Halaby. I examine how these authors negotiate the national trauma of September 11, 2001 and state of emergency ensuing in the wake of the attacks. I assess how these authors render legible Arab American and Muslim American encounters of 9/11 and its aftermath.
In this collection, Arab and Arab American feminists enlist their intimate experiences to challenge simplistic and long-held assumptions about gender, sexuality, and commitments to feminism and justice-centered struggles among Arab communities. Contributors hail from multiple geographical sites, spiritualities, occupations, sexualities, class backgrounds, and generations. Poets, creative writers, artists, scholars, and activists employ a mix of genres to express feminist issues and highlight how Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives simultaneously inhabit multiple, overlapping, and intersecting spaces: within families and communities; in anticolonial and antiracist struggles; in debates over spirituality and the divine; within radical, feminist, and queer spaces; in academia and on the street; and among each other. Contributors explore themes as diverse as the intersections between gender, sexuality, Orientalism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism, and the restoration of Arab Jews to Arab American histories. This book asks how members of diasporic communities navigate their sense of belonging when the country in which they live wages wars in the lands of their ancestors. Arab and Arab American Feminisms opens up new possibilities for placing grounded Arab and Arab American feminist perspectives at the center of gender studies, Middle East studies, American studies, and ethnic 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.