Contemporary Arab Women Writers

Anastasia Valassopoulos lectures on World Literatures at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of articles on Arab women writers, Tunisian film, Egyptian and Algerian popular culture, and has also written on the Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi.

• Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Women, not heroines or icons of modernity Beginnings Arab Feminism Western cultural exports in Arab social thought Feminist postcolonial theory and Arab representation 2 Again: Nawal El Saadawi From medicine to politics to fiction El Saadawi’s avowals Early novels And they die of desire for us 3 Danger and Creativity: Lebanese war novelists War stories How to write war? Hanan Al-Shaykh: what’s love got to do with it? Survival or bust: Al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues and Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within Concerned outsiders: what do they care? Bride martyrs and servant heroines 4 The Garnet years: translations Translation and rewriting Pain, suffering and ideology: The ‘Palestinian’ Novels ‘There are crimes of conscience which human laws fail to rectify’: Bakr’s The Golden Chariot Mothballs or Napthalene? 5 Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Ahdaf Soueif: ‘physical textures’ and ‘exceptional events’ I love you Algeria: Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh Against hybridity and towards a concept of becoming: Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun 6 Re-exoticizing the Orient A phantom heritage Popular revisions: harems and more harems Exoticism? The feeling which Diversity stirs in us: Djebar’s ‘Forbidden Gaze Severed Sound’ in Women Of Algiers in their Apartement and Sebbar’s Sherazade