Reading Iraqi Women's Novels in English Translation

By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories' politics of meaning-making. The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, whose novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and storytelling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women's story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women's literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories' geopolitical scope. This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, women's literature, translation studies and women and gender studies.

Ruth Abou Rached is a Lecturer in Arabic Cultural Studies for the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Manchester. Her book on Iraqi women's literature was inspired by community work and teaching in the UK, and living in the Middle East. Her research interests include Iraqi and Arab women's writing, Palestinian and other exilic literatures, postcolonial literary studies and intersectional feminist translation theories. She is editor for New Voices in Translation Studies, International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS).

Chapter 1: Pathways of Iraqi women's story-writing in English translation; Chapter 2: Translating 'the Uncanny'- Samira Al-Mana and Daizy Al-Amir; Chapter 3: Translating gendered dis/location in post-2003 Iraq - Inaam Kachachi; Chapter 4: Conversations about 'solidarity among the subaltern' - Betool Khedairi; Chapter 5: Re/writing confrontations in translation: Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein; Ongoing questions: re/reading Iraq women's stories in English (para) translation