Contemporary Arab Women Research Articles

Review

Art can be particularly an effective means of building transnational understanding across cultural divides. Specifically, the act of making art to express conflict, sexuality and identity is significant as Arab women have frequently been marginalised and excluded from such a site of visibility and meaning. Contemporary Arab women artists not only contribute to global feminist theory but also deal with their aesthetic, visual and personal concerns. The Body in Twilight: Representation of the Human Body, Sexuality and Struggle in Contemporary Arab Art is a book by the Syrian professor of visual art and design Fassih Keiso. In this book, Keiso explores the representation of the human body in contemporary Arab art and its relationship to issues of sexuality and struggle. He argues that the representation of the body in Arab art reflects broader societal changes and struggles and that the use of the body as a site of resistance and political commentary is a common theme in contemporary Arab art. Despite the lack of images of artworks by the artists discussed in this book, the book provides a compelling contribution to comparative gender and feminist art and the broader international art on the centrality of sexuality in politics and society.

The Language of Food: Semiotics in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Gastrographies

ABSTRACT In Diana Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava (2005) and Life Without a Recipe (2016), the author uses recipes as a vehicle for recalling childhood memories, stories about her father's (Bud's) immigration to the U.S., and her family's navigation of life between Jordan and America. The inclusion of recipes becomes a popularized form of autoethnographic storytelling that locates the self within the culture produced through the memory of food. Drawing on the work of Brinda Mehta's Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing, this chapter explores how Diana Abu-Jaber creates a culinary sign system capable of transmitting hybrid identity throughout her memoir. As Mehta notes, this type of autobiography serves as a palimpsest preserving personal memory, familial stories, and socio-cultural systems within the contours of the memoir. Furthermore, Elizabeth Ettorre's Autoethnography as Feminist Method points out that feminist autoethnographic works use the personal to assert agency in the political. Taken together, the semiotics of food in gastrography becomes praxis of autoethnography, creating a space for Arab American writers rejecting marginalisation. Thus, this essay explores the richness of Abu-Jaber's life stories through the prism of food as she uses cuisine to autoethnographically locate the self within her diasporic Arab American community.

You Don't Own This War: Arab Women's Cinema Showcase

With only nine films, “Here and Now: Contemporary Arab Women Filmmakers,” a film series exhibited in August 2019 at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox, is inevitably limited in the variety of style, form, and storytelling it can convey. However, by highlighting both the diversity and intersectionality of identities, the films presented are linked by a compelling thematic thread: they all investigate how cinema represents Arab women with a focus on the body, its materiality, and the power relations that determine it. Although each film reflected its local political and socio-economic context, collectively these films by Arab women utilized the body as a mediated object with the potential to destabilize, disrupt, and transform.

Comedic resilience: Arab women’s diaries of national struggles and dissident humour

This article explores the potential strategic functions of humour in diaries that record national struggles by contemporary Arab women, namely Palestinian author Suad Amiry's Sharon and my Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2006) and Egyptian writer Mona Prince's Revolution is my Name: an Egyptian Woman's Diary from Eighteen Days in Tahrir (2014). Drawing on existing research into postcolonial and feminist comedy, the article argues that the use of humour to articulate revolutionary moments constitutes what I describe as 'comedic resilience' through which comedy is intentionally, reflectively and strategically deployed by the authors under discussion as a dissident strategy to intersectional dominant structures of power to which Arab women are subjected. This subjugating, concentric power structure comprises colonial/state hegemony, nationalist dogmatism, local and external patriarchies and cultural/representational silencing. Equally, I consider the ways in which the intersection of war diary-writing and comedy problematises the representational literary traditions of national struggles. Using humour in contexts where they are expected to grieve, the authors under scrutiny rework the conventional understanding of war life-writing and with it the role and position of Arab women in militarised contexts of conflicts.

Re-thinking Literary Space in Huda Barakat’s the Stone of Laughter

The Arab woman not only has contributed to the changing of the contemporary Arab literature but also has used her pen in times of wars and conflicts as a kind of resistance. Nawal Saadawi says: “does anything more than danger stimulate our creativity? And does anything threaten our creativity more than danger?” (N. Saadawi, 1996:157). In her article “Mapping Peace”, the literary critic Miriam Cooke claims that women have a stake in interpreting their war experiences. In fact, writing during war time is an experience that is part of war itself, an experience that informs the socio-political roles that precede it. The Lebanese, the Palestinian, and most recently the Iraqi women writers are vivid, genuine representatives of what a woman can create during times of war, how she can re-shape her experience of war and which portrait she can give to this experience. Hanane Sheikh, Sahar Khalifah, Mai Ghoussoub and Huda Barakat’s writings are instances of the Arab woman’s creativity in moments of conflicts, of wars and of danger. Women’s war literature allows the intolerable to be written because women do not take part in wars with arms but rather with their pens, their voices and their intellects. In fact, women writers subvert time, space and thus history to create their own world and their own records. This trend of Arab literature is viewed as an authoritative tool against the violence of war and as a passive resistance. It is also authoritative in terms of representing space and time as reshaped by wars. Contemporary Arab women writers have shown a big interest of creativity in writing novels, poems and short stories that lucidly portray the transformations war brings, and they have also shown a genuine capacity of subverting moments of war and transforming war time into moments of creation and metamorphosis. The present paper unveils Arab women writers’ genuine ability in creating a narrative space and a narrative time that is proper to moments of wars through their literary writings. Huda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter is going to be our corpus as it represents a vivid depiction of the Lebanese Civil War, and “the best novel written about the Lebanese civil war.”

Five Troops for Every Tree: Lamenting Green Carnage in Contemporary Arab Women's War Diaries

Stories about “green carnage” often get lost among headlines, which most often emphasize civilian and material costs in times of war. War's violation of the environment, however, has serious repercussions for the communities who have strong economic, emotional, and sociopolitical ties to the land. Using Ecocriticism as a framework, I provide a close textual analysis of five contemporary war diaries by Arab women, Suad Amiry's (2004) Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, Riverbend's (2005) Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, Zena El-Khalil's (2006) “Beirut Update,” IraqiGirl's (2009) IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq, and Laila El-Haddad's (2010) Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between. I demonstrate how these environment-centered diaries engage with contemporary debates about the impact of militarization on the environment and how that environmental impact affects the inhabitants. I argue that these counter-narratives demonstrate an increasingly prominent environmental consciousness among civilians in war-torn countries in the Middle East.

Imprisonment, freedom, and literary opacity in the work of Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression.

Response to Tara Mendola's "Where Do We Go From Here? Reading 'Arab Women's Writing' Today" College Literature 36.3 (Summer 2009): 221-29

Response to Tara Mendola's "Where Do We Go From Here? Reading 'Arab Women's Writing' Today" College Literature36.3 (Summer 2009): 221-29 Brinda J. Mehta Response to Tara Mendola's "Where Do We Go From Here? Reading 'Arab Women's Writing' Today" College Literature36. 3( Summer2009): 221-29 [Review by Tara Mendola ] I am responding to a review of my book, Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing(2007) by Tara Mendola, which was previously published in College Literature(Mendola 2009). While reviewers are free to express their opinions, I am alarmed by the extremely partial and misleading critique of my work in this particular review essay. The deliberate omission of key chapters is very disturbing. Three of the most important sections on Palestine, Lebanon, Algeria, and Iraq are not even mentioned. The chapter on Palestine is nearly forty-eight pages (28-75). The chapter on Lebanon and Iraq (188-227) comprises another forty pages, while the discussion of Algerian author Malika Mokkeddem (76-120) also remains unacknowledged. I question the reviewer's choices, given her chapter-by-chapter analysis of Nawar El-Hassan Golley's edited volume Arab Women's Lives Retold: Exploring Identity through Writing, which precedes the critique of my book. Given the current geopolitical situation in the world today, and the politically charged situations in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon, I am very concerned that the review chose to eliminate even a brief mention of these chapters. This critical excision is particularly curious given the review's own lamentations on the situation in Gaza when she references Golley's anthology. To quote: "As I write this review in the aftermath of the latest violent convulsion in Gaza, over a thousand human beings have been slaughtered, more wounded—each one someone's child. And so, the image of the maternal body ridden with the detritus of war which it cannot expel appears a particularly appropriate way for this volume to conclude" (Mendola 2009, 226). Ironically, the opening chapter of my book focuses on the situation of Palestinian refugees in the decimated camp of Tal Ezza'tar located in East Beirut from 1968 to 1982. The destruction of the camp by a Lebanese-Israeli coalition is a historical fact fictionalized in Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror. This novel highlights the pre-Intifada resistance of Palestinian mothers and daughters who attempt to "wage peace" through creative, non-violent activism as a response to the masculinist ethics of war. These narratives simultaneously [End Page 223]contest and conform to dominant gender ideologies, as the women provide a gendered account of the Palestinian resistance struggle in Lebanon. The chapter also explores the link between trauma and the memory of occupation. None of this is mentioned in the review, even though historical and literary accounts of Tal Ezza'tar occupy such an important place in Middle Eastern politics and literature. I remain equally baffled by the complete negation of Chapter Five, "Cities Under Siege and the Language of Survival in Hanan Al-Shaykh's Beirut Bluesand Nuha Al-Radi's Baghdad Diaries," even though the reviewer cursorily dismisses Hanan Al Shaykh as a popular Lebanese writer: "Again the usual works of Fatima Mernissi, Assia Djedbar [Djebar], and Nawal El Saadawi appear, joined by popular Lebanese author Hanan al-Shakh [Shaykh]" (Mendola 2009, 226). Beirut Bluesis an important novel on the Lebanese Civil War, in which Al Shaykh memorializes her beloved city in the language of the blues and artistic creation, while criticizing the impact of war on civilians. Baghdad Diaries, and the follow-up essay "Twenty-eight Days in Baghdad," go a step further by chronicling the devastation of Baghdad in postmodern warfare using first-hand narration. The author Nuha Al-Radi died in 2004, a victim of the after effects of radiation generated by uranium deposits and cluster bombs used during the U.S. coalition-led "Shock and Awe" campaigns. Al-Radi uses the medium of recycled Embargo Art to make a political statement about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, trade sanctions, and popular resistance to war. However, the reviewer states in her introductory paragraph: "Listed in the introduction...

Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing

Gender, an issue that has been in the headlines for decades now, has naturallyalso attracted the scholarly attention of both men and women. In thebook under review, Brinda Mehta, professor of French and FrancophoneStudies at Mills College, inquires into the subject of gender from the perspectiveof a select group of leading contemporary women writers in theArab world whose compositions express the complexities of life for Arabwomen in the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq), NorthAfrica (Egypt,Algeria, andMorocco), and the United States (LosAngeles). The authors areallArabs on both sides, except forDianaAbu-Jaber, daughter of a JordanianbornArab Muslim father and an American Christian mother. The novelschosen for analysis have widely varying plots, but all reflect the place ofwomen inArab society and how they cope with difficult circumstances.The book is divided into six chapters, each devoted to one ormore compositions(novels) by a writer or two, whose stimulation to write was derivedat least in part from their own personal experiences ...

The Appropriation of Tradition in Selected Works of Contemporary Arab Women Writers

AbstractThis study aims at discussing the appropriation of traditional material in selected works of contemporary Arab women writers. While such appropriation is conceived as a subversive strategy of self-empowerment, it also offers a venue of cultural self-critique and re-evaluation of the self. Reclaiming the lost tradition of telling stories, these writers assume the role of Shahrazād to contest male dominance. Whether they simply adopt this role, reinterpret, or undermine it, these writers have got much to say about reacting to tradition in general and to androcentric hegemony in particular.

Rituals of memory in contemporary Arab women's writing

Rituals of memory in contemporary Arab women's writing

Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of the Present

Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of the Present

Dialogue of the present: CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN’S ART

Research Article| May 01 2000 Dialogue of the present: CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN’S ART Juliet Highet Juliet Highet Juliet Highet is an art critic based in London Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nka (2000) 2000 (11-12): 34–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-11-12-1-34 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Juliet Highet; Dialogue of the present: CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN’S ART. Nka 1 May 2000; 2000 (11-12): 34–39. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-11-12-1-34 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNka Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2000 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyada's Studies of Three Women's Lives

Biographical sketches of Famous Women appeared regularly in the women's press of turn-of-the-century Egypt. Drawing on a long Arabic tradition of biographical compilation, they yet were something new in choice of subject and rhetoric. Aiming not only to educate but also to shape the middle-class female audience that the editors of the women's press sought, these brief life stories elucidate agendas as much as they point up conflicts. Found in many periodicals directed at women in Egypt throughout this century, this genre may be an important source for charting the development of subjectivity and self-image among middle-class women; it is certainly a useful source for mapping struggles over the definition and control of women's lives. These short sketches had come to pervade the women's press by the 1910s and early 1920s; and it was in this period that women's biography became explicitly part of the drive to create a feminist consciousness among a middle-class urban audience, through three studies on women writers by the Lebanese-Palestinian essayist, poet and orator Mayy Ziyada (1886-1941). First published in 1919-25, Ziyada's biographical works came at a time when organized feminism in Egypt was just emerging. In length and depth her studies moved beyond the short biographical sketches of the women's magazines while retaining similar emphases. Ziyada attempted a full and contextualized study of individual women whose lives encapsulated and could in some way shape contemporary Arab women's construction of their pasts and futures. And, revealing the impact her subjects had had on her own life and thought, stressing commonalities between her own experience and theirs, Ziyada acknowledged—if she did not directly confront— the intersection of a biographer's own situation and interests with the life stories she produces.1 Undermining any presumption of a biographer's objective distance, this recognition also served the rhetorical and feminist purpose of creating an illusion of personal linkage between subject, biographer, and an audience of women. Ziyada's biographies have been recognized as achieving a sympathetic and careful treatment of three women's lives; what has not been pointed out is how those works built upon the demonstrated capacity of women's biography in the women's press to highlight gender-role shifts in process and also to suggest an agenda for further change. They activated,