Hanadi Al-Samman’s Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writing (2015) and Amira Jarmakani’s An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (2015) share an analytic investment in gender as an axis of subject formation in transnational literatures. Al-Samman studies the work of Arab women writers in the diaspora to understand how women navigate authorship in patriarchal contexts and how the writers’ social position as diasporic women informs their literary production. For Jarmakani, the American desert romance novel, marked by the use of the desert and the sheikh as tropes, models imperial constructions of gender and sexuality that not only produce heteronormative subjects but echo and justify the logic of the United States’ war on terror. An Imperialist Love Story looks to the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in desert...
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1 March 2017
Product Review|
March 01 2017
Sheikhs and Shahrazad: Transnational Feminist Methods for Reading Diasporic and Popular Literatures of the Middle East
Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writing
. Al-Samman, Hanadi. Syracuse, NY
: Syracuse University Press
, 2015
. 294 pages. isbn 9780815634027.
An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror
. Jarmakani, Amira. New York
: New York University Press
, 2015
. 267 pages. isbn 9781479820863.
Mejdulene B. Shomali
Mejdulene B. Shomali
MEJDULENE B. SHOMALI is assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Contact: mshomali@umbc.edu.
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Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (2017) 13 (1): 124–127.
Citation
Mejdulene B. Shomali; Sheikhs and Shahrazad: Transnational Feminist Methods for Reading Diasporic and Popular Literatures of the Middle East. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 March 2017; 13 (1): 124–127. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-3728690
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