Contemporary Arab Women Writers

This book engages with contemporary Arab women writers from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Algeria. In spite of Edward Said's groundbreaking reappraisal of the uneven relationship between the West and the Arab world in Orientalism, there has been little postcolonial criticism of Arab writing. Anastasia Valassopoulos raises the profile of Arab women writers by examining how they negotiate contexts and experiences that have come to be identified with postcoloniality such as the preoccupation with Western feminism, political conflict and war, the social effects of non-conformity and female empowerment, and the negotiation of influential cultural discourses such as orientalism. Contemporary Arab Women Writers revitalizes theoretical concepts associated with feminism, gender studies and cultural studies, and explores how art history, popular culture, translation studies, psychoanalysis and news media all offer productive ways to associate with Arab women's writing that work beyond a limiting socio-historical context. Discussing the writings of authors including Ahdaf Soueif, Nawal El Saadawi, Leila Sebbar, Liana Badr and Hanan Al-Shaykh, this book represents a new direction in postcolonial literary criticism that transcends constrictive monothematic approaches.

Anastasia Valassopoulos lectures on World Literatures at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of articles on Arab women writers, Tunisian film, Egyptian and Algerian popular culture, and has also written on the Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Women, not heroines or icons of modernity Beginnings Arab Feminism Western cultural exports in Arab social thought Feminist postcolonial theory and Arab representation 2 Again: Nawal El Saadawi From medicine to politics to fiction El Saadawi's avowals Early novels And they die of desire for us 3 Danger and Creativity: Lebanese war novelists War stories How to write war? Hanan Al-Shaykh: what's love got to do with it? Survival or bust: Al-Shaykh's Beirut Blues and Ghoussoub's Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within Concerned outsiders: what do they care? Bride martyrs and servant heroines 4 The Garnet years: translations Translation and rewriting Pain, suffering and ideology: The 'Palestinian' Novels 'There are crimes of conscience which human laws fail to rectify': Bakr's The Golden Chariot Mothballs or Napthalene? 5 Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Ahdaf Soueif: 'physical textures' and 'exceptional events' I love you Algeria: Mosteghanemi's Memory in the Flesh Against hybridity and towards a concept of becoming: Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun 6 Re-exoticizing the Orient A phantom heritage Popular revisions: harems and more harems Exoticism? The feeling which Diversity stirs in us: Djebar's 'Forbidden Gaze Severed Sound' in Women Of Algiers in their Apartement and Sebbar's Sherazade