Dissident Writings of Arab Women

Brinda J. Mehta is the Germaine Thompson Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she teaches postcolonial African and Caribbean literatures, contemporary French literature, and transnational feminist theory. She is the author of; Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing (2009); Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing (2007); and Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani (Winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, 2007).

• Introduction; Part 1 Violence and war; Chapter 1 Contesting violence and imposed silence; Part 2 Violence and social/sexual oppression; Chapter 2 Sexual violence and testimony; Chapter 3 Gendering the Straits; Chapter 4 Writing from the banlieue; Part 3 Staging violence in North African women’s theatre; Chapter 5 Madness as political dissent in Jalila Baccar’s Junun; Chapter 6 The darker side of Tahrir in Laila Soliman’s No Time for Art and Blue Bra Day; conclusion Conclusion;

Brinda Mehta’s Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices against Violence is a timely engagement with an understudied topic. Focusing in particular on the diaspora and sites of displacement, she brings into the discussion of feminist dissent a powerful insight that is substantiated throughout with blueprint material and documentation. Going beyond the condescending manner that blighted a portion of the feminist critique, she delves into writings and documents that present Arab women’s struggle through art, literature , and other public sphere activity to interrogate forms and types of violence that have targeted women populations. But rather than devising ethnic and genderic divides, the effort in this book is focused on manifestations of violence as strategies and methods that cannot be seen outside the colonial and imperial onslaught. The postcolonial scriptoria is expanded and enriched beyond the colonial encounter. Building up its strong argument across languages and borders, this book is a serious and well-documented contribution to the study of feminist dissent.Muhsin al-Musawi, Professor of Arabic Literature, Columbia University