Arab Women's Lives Retold : Exploring Identity Through Writing

Illustrations xiii Foreword, miriam cooke xv Acknowledgments xix Contributors xxi Introduction: Contemporary Arab Women's Autobiographical Writings xxv Nawar Al-Hassan Golley Artistic Works Discussed xxxv PART ONE Autobiographical Writings and Cultural Hybridity Passage Through the Harem: Historicizing a Western Obsession in Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America---a Woman's Journey 3(13) Bernadette Andrea Dismembering the Gaze: Speleology and Vivisection in Assia Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia 16(19) Karina Eileraas Yasmina, an Autodiegetic Character: Herstory and History 35(16) Benaouda Lebdai PART TWO Autobiographical Writings and Transnationalism Poetic Geographies: Interracial Insurgency in Arab American Autobiographical Spaces 51(20) Keith Feldman Postnational Ethics, Postcolonial Politics: Raimonda Tawil's My Home, My Prison 71(19) Jamil Khader A Muslim Woman Writes Back: Leila Abouzeid's Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman 90(21) Pauline Homsi Vinson PART THREE Autobiographical Writings and Communal Identity Voices Across the Frontier: Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood 111(18) Filiz Turhan-Swenson To Undo What the North Has Done: Fragments of a Nation and Arab Collectivism in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif 129(26) Mrinalini Chakravorty Weaving Poetic Autobiographies: Individual and Communal Identities in the Poetry of Mohja Kahf and Suheir Hammad 155(26) Carol Fadda-Conrey PART FOUR The Personal and the Political in Autobiographical Writings Arab Women Write the Trauma of Imprisonment and Exile 181(20) Daphne M. Grace A Journey of Belonging: A Global(ized) Self Finds Peace 201(21) Nawar Al-Hassan Golley Ahmad Al-Issa Art, Autobiography, and the Maternal Abject 222(19) Mireille Astore References 241(18) Index 259