Going Global

Amireh, Amal; Majaj, Lisa Suhair

doi:10.4324/9781315864235

Cited by 3 publications

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“…In that spirit, this article engages with calls to take seriously the ethics and politics of Arabic literary texts as they circulate in the world, while remaining sensitive to the pull of institutions, discourses, and politics on them, and to their local contexts. 64 With this knowledge of the challenges facing translation from the Arabic, and the structural, institutional, political, and market obstacles that loom large over Arab women's writing, I admit that, as Eve Troutt Powell puts it, "airing the issue of slavery/race [in English to an Anglophone readership] seems to bare too much," 65 and provokes a niggling sense of cultural betrayal. This resonates particularly strongly with me because I am not dealing with a distant historical past that can be understood to have passed, but with a more-or-less contemporary moment in which racism continues to be a hotly debated issue in contemporary Lebanese society.…”

Section: Talking About Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whitewashing Arabic for global consumption: translating race inThe Story of Zahra

Hayek¹

2017

Middle Eastern Literatures

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This article argues that in reading comparatively the Arabic and English versions of Hanan al-Shaykh's 1980 H  ikāyat Zahra, a pattern of omitting race and racial language emerges in the English version, published in 1986. I use a close reading of the translation's selective appropriation of the original's racial and political language to argue for a more intersectional approach to Arabic women's writing, even as I acknowledge the structural and institutional contexts and constraints under which they operate and circulate in the global market of "world literature." First published in 1980, Hanan al-Shaykh's H  ikāyat Zahra is a novel that has transcended its Arabic origins and established itself as a world literary text, 1 in the Damroschian sense of a work that has had an "effective life within a literary system beyond that of its original culture." 2 The novel tells the story of a troubled young Lebanese woman named Zahra in the early years of Lebanon's civil war. It has been critically acclaimed and hailed as an indictment of Lebanese (and Arab) patriarchal culture, as well as a text that lays bare the horrors of violence, war, and trauma. 3 The novel is divided into two distinct parts; its Arabic version names them "part one" and "part 2," with numbered, untitled chapters in the first part, and one continuous chapter in the second. 4 The first part of the novel is taken up by Zahra's life in an unnamed country in sub-Saharan Africa in which she seeks refuge from her life in Lebanon by traveling to visit her uncle, who is in political exile. While there, she meets and marries a young man from southern Lebanon. This part of the novel has three distinct first-person voices: Zahra's, her uncle Hashem's, and her husband Majed's. The second part of the novel recounts Zahra's return to Beirut upon the breakup of her marriage, and her affair with and ultimate death at the hands of a neighborhood sniper who murders her after she has revealed her pregnancy to him. Al-Shaykh's novel has been a commercial and critical success since its publication. In Arabic, it has gone into several print runs; the most recent edition in 2009 is its fifth. Like much of Hanan al-Shaykh's other writing, Zahra is a text that has also circulated easily in the global literary sphere. 5 The novel has been translated into many languages,

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Section: Talking About Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whitewashing Arabic for global consumption: translating race inThe Story of Zahra

Hayek¹

2017

Middle Eastern Literatures

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Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press

Jiwani¹

2009

University of Toronto Quarterly

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On the international stage, Canada is renowned for its multicultural ethos, its peacekeeping reputation, and its moderate politics vis-à-vis the United States. Nonetheless, post-9/11, the Canadian press followed the US media in casting Afghan women as abject victims who could be rescued only by what Iris Marion Young has aptly called the ‘knights of civilization.’ Yet the discursive manner in which support for the US-led war was invoked bore traces of a counter-hegemonic frame. This essay interrogates representations of Afghan women in the Globe and Mail, Canada's major English-language daily and newspaper of record. Examining the coverage over a seven-year period, the author traces the changes and continuities marking these representations in response to Canada's initial peacekeeping and subsequent military involvement in Afghanistan. The Orientalist construction of Islam as a homogeneous and monolithic faith and its representation as an essentialized patriarchal force are underscored. The framing of Afghan women living in Canada in contrast to their counterparts in Afghanistan is explored with respect to issues of agency, victimhood, and Canadian benevolence. The essay concludes with observations on how this coverage reinforces and legitimates an imagined community that is reflective of Canada as a white, settler colony.

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Le féminisme dans/et le postcolonialisme

Bahri¹

2010

Genre, Postcolonialisme Et Diversité De Mouvements De Femmes

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Going Global

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Whitewashing Arabic for global consumption: translating race inThe Story of Zahra

Whitewashing Arabic for global consumption: translating race inThe Story of Zahra

Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press

Le féminisme dans/et le postcolonialisme

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