Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing

This volume carefully assesses fixed notions of Arab womanhood by exploring the complexities of Arab women's lives as portrayed in literature. Encompassing women writers and critics from Arab, French, and English traditions, it forges a transnational Arab feminist consciousness.

Brinda Mehta examines the significance of memory rituals in women's writings, such as the importance of water and purification rites in Islam and how these play out in the women's space of the hammam (Turkish bath). Mehta shows how sensory experiences connect Arab women to their past. Specific chapters raise awareness of the experiences of Palestinian women in exile and under occupation, Bedouin and desert rituals, and women's views on conflict in Iraq and Lebanon, and the compatibility between Islam and feminism. At once provocative and enlightening, this work is a groundbreaking addition to the timely field of modern Arab women's writing and criticism and Arab literary studies.

Author: Brinda Mehta
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 04/26/2007
Pages: 318
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.24lbs
Size: 9.14h x 6.41w x 1.04d
ISBN: 9780815631354

About the Author

Brinda Mehta is a professor of French and Francophone studies at Mills College, Oakland, California. Her book, Diasporic Dis(locations): Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the "Kala Pani," won the Caribbean Philosophical Association's Frantz Fannon award for outstanding work in Indo-Caribbean thought.