A ‘phantom freedom in a phantom modernity’? Protestant missionaries, domestic ideology and narratives of modernity in an Arab context

Abstract

Jean Said Makdisi's Teta, mother and me: An Arab woman's memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women, her grandmother, her mother and herself. The stories of three women are blended in one narrative about the historical transformations that took place in the Arab world as a consequence of an encounter between east and west. The story of the three women is the story of the plight of a Palestinian family living through tumultuous times: it is a story of high expectations, painful disillusionments and stoic struggles for survival amidst the raging conflicts and colonial interventions that beset the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The memoir is also a conscious attempt to revisit and re-inscribe the implications of a crucial cross-cultural encounter, between the east and west through missionary schools, on the lives of women in the Arab world. A historical record narrated from a feminist postcolonial lens Teta, mother and me is a valuable contribution to contemporary public histories about the Arab world in general, and Arab women in particular. This article argues that the memoir brings to world public histories new material and new voices that are not conventionally included, hence potentially leading to new historical narratives. It also contributes to an original and nuanced understanding of contemporary topical questions in world public history about the construction of national identities, modernity and neocolonial power relations as manifested and played out in missionary schools in the Middle East.