Using postcolonial feminist theory, the researcher attempts in this article to redefine the interpretive framework through which courses on Islam and North African women are being taught in American undergraduate classes. Several conceptual limitations have been identified: inadequate knowledge of the geography and history of North Africa; the discursive dichotomy between East and West; the production of the Muslim woman as a single category; the tendency to de‐historicize Islam and Eastern cultures in general into unchanging and closed systems of religious practices and beliefs; the uncritical adoption of Islamic exegesis as an explanatory prism to understand all the woes of the Islamic world; and the cultural essentialism underlying the discourse of multiculturalism in American textbooks. To each one of these limitations, the author proposes alternative teaching strategies such as the historicization of all discourses on Muslim women; inclusion of the scholarship of Maghrebian women scholars in the classroom; role‐playing; cross‐cultural comparisons; and the integration of medieval maps and Renaissance drawings as well as audiovisual materials produced in North Africa and the Middle East ranging from political cartoons and commercials to youth programs like “Star Academy.”
Countering the Eurocentric view that the entire Muslim world denies the Holocaust, this paper demonstrates how Maghrebian writers have engaged in the Shoah through the local aesthetics of Sufi Islam and the blood ties of Andalusia rather than the patronizing prism of western humanism. Waciny Larej 's Balconies of the North Sea (2002) is a typical case of the transgressive Arabic literature which continues to be ignored by Western academia for various political and ideological reasons. Through the testimonial accounts of Yassine and Anne Frank, Larej instrumentalizes the Holocaust and uses the textual space of the novel as a proxy setting for the war crime tribunal thwarted by Bouteflika's decree of national amnesia. Whereas Holocaust testimonial literature is based on a crisis of truth (Shoshana Felman), the testimonial literature ensuing from the Algerian Civil War revolves around a crisis of state responsibility.
In this paper I argue that Tlatli's Silences of the Palace is a political allegory that resists both Eurocentric feminism and the discourse of Tunisian nationalism. Through the metaphor of incest, points of scream, and the narrative structure, Tlatli reveals how women are oppressed from without and within. I examine three historical contexts in which the exchange of women takes place in the film: A Biblical/Qur'anic time in which Sarah gives Hagar as a gift to Abraham; the North African concept of the habus system in pre-colonial and French North Africa; and the shift from family to state patriarchy after independence. Going beyond the Eurocentric understanding of heteropatriarchy as female subordination, Tlatli reconstructs it as a Janus-like figure, with male and female heads, race/class, religion/secularism, and nationalism as its quadrifrons.
This article examines the representation of Dido/Elissa in Tunisian literature and nationalism and the literary, visual and performing arts of the West. This study has three central arguments. The first holds that the myth of Dido has served in these various discourses as an aesthetic tool to discuss expanding empires and state hegemony as well as gender, racial and national identity. The second claim this study makes is that all discourses on Dido are enunciated from specific hegemonic positions; be they privileges of race, class, gender, nationality, or education. The last argument affirms that these various artistic modes (epics, operas, paintings, novels, or museums), have produced images of Dido that are overlapping and contradictory at times. Dido emerges in the end as a liminal or trickster figure who defies all boundaries and definitions.
Des Voix contre le silence, Anne Marie Miraglia (2005) Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, 156 pp., ISBN 0-907310-60-5 (pbk), 14.50 Breadfruit or Chestnut? Gender Construction in the French Caribbean Novel, Bonnie Thomas (2006) Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Lexington Books, 201 pp., ISBN 0-7391-1583-9 (hbk), $60.00 Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image, Bennetta Jules-Rosette (2007) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 368 pp., ISBN 9780252074127 (pbk), US$25 L'Illusion de l'altrit. tudes de littrature africaine, Bernard Mouralis (2007) Paris: ditions Honor Champion, coll. Bibliothque de Littrature Gnrale et Compare, dir. Jean Bessire, 784 pp., ISBN 978-2-7453-1483-3 (hbk), 125 Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet's Paris, Marni Reva Kessler (2006) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 215 pp., ISBN 0-8166-4782-8 (pbk), $22.50 Diplomates crivains du Canada, Jean-Franois de Raymond (2007) Brussels, Bern, Frankfurt, New York, Oxford, Vienna: Peter Lang, 164 pp., ISBN 978-90-5201-346-6 (pbk), SFR36, 14.90 Tunisie: Rve de partages, edited by Guy Dugas (2005) Lonrai: Omnibus, 1065 pp., ISBN 2-258-06679-4 (pbk), 23.75 Victims and Victimization in French and Francophone Literature, edited by Buford Norman (2005) Amsterdam: Rodopi, Francophone Literature Series, xii + 184 pp., ISBN: 9-0420-1615-9 (pbk), $54
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