This dissertation explores the development of a risky but empowering culture-specific women's consciousness by the protagonists of Sefi Atta and Laila Lalami's early novels. My insertion of Jameson's ...“primacy of the national situation” in the development of a woman's composite consciousness allows the reader to gain an understanding of women's marginalization and subsequent empowerment in a specific setting such as Casablanca, Morocco or Lagos, Nigeria. The composite factor is essential to understand the lived experiences of people in specific cultures within the postcolonial nation, for it acknowledges the importance of traditional resources but also the modern liberation tools available to the women. This study places Atta and Lalami's characters squarely in their cultural milieu so that they are read in their social, economic, political, racial, ethnic, and religious contexts. Just as Abouzeid argued that progress in studying women must be centered on women's social and political milieu because it is there that women's agency and oppression can be localized and contextualized, this study argues that women's empowerment is, in fact, grounded on what it means to be a woman in her particular society with its cultural expressions and norms. This approach focuses on a very practical and empowering experience for women as it ties them even more closely to their communities, even as they advocate for more options than were previously available to them. This culture-specificity empowers these characters to function even more efficiently as women who continually change and improve their communities in Nigeria and Morocco. Atta and Lalami's use of the concept of the composite consciousness in the frame of the local tradition serves as a unifying metaphor for each novel. This composite consciousness approach has the potential to answer Chandra Talpade Mohanty's call for a paradigm that is culture-specific yet creates solidarity across subjectivities and across the globe without erasing difference.
After colonization nominally ended, the conflict between the West and the former colonies has shifted into the cultural sphere. In the process of establishing new genres (drama and novel) and ...modernizing existing ones (poetry), modernism has been espoused by most anti-neocolonialist Egyptian authors. Postcolonial modernism, a hybrid cultural product that is neither solely derivative of nor completely independent from Western modernism, is characterized by confusingly enmeshed paradoxes. Postcolonial intellectuals opted to borrow cultural products from the very entity they resist. This anomaly has been intensified by their relationship with their identity-bearing tradition, which has to be simultaneously preserved and interrogated. I propose a two-way reading of texts, one which investigates both the indigenization of Western cultural products and the modernization of traditionalist ones. Unlike Western modernism, which has a straightforward, temporal relationship with the tradition it seeks to replace, postcolonial modernism is primarily occupied with identity preservation, solely attainable through a modernist engagement with tradition rather than its replacement. A number of theories of Arab modernism are investigated. The methodology emerging from this investigation is employed in close readings of a number of literary and critical texts illustrating continuity with and divergence from both indigenous tradition and Western modernism. This analysis sheds light on the unique trajectories of development of the genres of poetry, drama, and female-authored narratives in post-independence Egyptian literature.
In a speech delivered by Nawal El Saadawi at the World Social Forum on Jan 16-21, 2004 in Mumbai India, he stresses how the political movement of Islamic fundamentalism has developed and has taken ...place in many countries in both the East and the West and in the Arab region. He elaborates that for the past thirty years, the main target of the movement in the Arab countries is directed against women, where control of women, domestication of their bodies and especially of their minds has always been considered by them as one of their most important, if not their most important aims. This is manifest in the banning of many women's groups and associations during the past years. In order to prevent women from fighting back against war and increased exploitation, their organization are disolved when they arise.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
تعني هذه الدراسة برصد صورة الشخصية المركزية في أدب نوال السعداوي من المنظور الجنسوي، حيث يمكن الولوج خلال ذالك إلى عالم المرأة/ الكاتبة، بما ينطوي عليه من تجارب متمايزة من شأنها أن تسم كتاباتها ...بالخصوصية؛ ذلك أن صورة الشخصية المركزية تعد أحد المحاور الرئيسية التي تمكن من تبين حقيقة رؤية الكاتبة للعالم مع إدراك رؤية الكاتبة إلى العالم تتضح لنا تدريجيا مدى خصوصية الكتابة لديها، أي أن خصوصية كتابات المرأة عموما تكمن في خصوصية رؤيتها إلى العالم ولأن رؤية الكاتبة نوال السعداوي هي التي تتحكم في اختيار موضوعاتها، وشخصياتها في رواياتها، كما تتحكم، أيضاء في اختيار جزئيات هذه الموضوعات مما يؤثر بدوره على بناء العمل الأدبي، لذا فالعناية هنا تنصب على محاولة الكشف عن رؤية الكاتبة ومدى تأثيرها على العمل الفني، من حيث التشكيل البنائي والفني للشخصية المركزية في رواياتها. وهذه الرؤية، كما سيجيء في البحث، تتأسس لديها بناء على هويتها البيولوجية، وتجربتها، وثقافتها. لذا، فالبحث هنا لا ينطلق من افتراض مسبق بوجود اختلافات في الكتابة بين الجنسين، لكنه ينطلق من محاولة جادة لتحديد الصلة بين هوية الكاتبة البيولوجية وبين الأثر الأدبي الذي تبدعه، أي أيديولوجيتها، ولتحديد الصلة بين هذه الرؤية وأسلوب بنائها للشخصية المركزية الذي اختارته للتعبير عنها. ولما كان موضوع بحثي هو بناء الشخصية المركزية في أدب نوال السعداوي من المنظور الجنسوي والتي هي دائما المرأة ، قضيتها، صورتها، ومدى تمايز إنتاجها، أو بمعنى آخر، موضوع يؤثر ويتأثر بالمحيط الذي يعيش فيه، لذالك كان من الضروري أن أكون لنفسي إحساسا واضحا عن العوامل الرئيسية التي أثرت في وضعية المرأة في المجتمع، وتبعا لذالك أثرت في فكرها ولغتها. إن قيمة الوعي بماهية صورة المرأة والرجل في كتابات المرأة هي قيمة كشفية، حيث تتضح لنا ومن خلالها رؤية الكاتبة لا إلى ذاتها فحسب، بل إلى العالم أيضا، بمعنى بروز أيديولوجيتها أيضا. تعني هذه الدراسة بتحليل الصورة الفنية للمرأة والرجل في أدب نوال السعداوي، وتعني بتجربتها ككاتبة ولكن في حيز علاقتها مع الذكورة، إذ أن المرأة حين تكتب، عن علاقتها بالرجل، إنما هي تترجم عملية الاختلاف الاجتماعي بين الجنسين. وكأن الحديث عن المرأة لا يتأتي في معزل عن الحديث عن الرجل، وبالعكس، ربما لأن الحديث عن أحدهما لا بد وأن يستدعي الحديث عن الآخر. إن أيديولوجية نوال السعداوي تموضع المرأة بمكانة مميزة. كل رواية من الروايات الأربع والمطروحة للبحث في هذه الدراسة تحيلنا إلى فترات متغايرة في حياتها. من أجل إبراز التغاير في أسلوبها ونهجها من رواية لأخرى جاء اختيارنا للروايات: "امرأة عند نقطة الصفر" ( 1973)، تعني هذه الدراسة برصدعالم المرأة / الكاتبة "سقوط الإما; ( 1986)، "جنات وإبليس; ( 1992)، "ز; ( 2009) بحيث تمثل كل من هذه الروايات حقبة من الزمن في حياة الكاتبة نوال السعداوي، فجاء الاختيار الزمني مبنيا على مبدأ العشريات: المتبعينات، فالثمانينات، فالتسعينات، فسنوات الألفين، ذالك لاعتقادنا أن تطور الفن القصصي عند المرأة هو مرأة لتطور المجتمع ومرأة تعكس التغيرات أو اللاتغيرات التي تمر بها الروائية عبر المتنين. وبالرغم من تناولنا القضية الزمن في دراستنا، فمن الجدير بالذكر أن سنوات إصدار الروايات الأربع، والمطروحة للبحث في هذه الدراسة، هي فترة تباينت فيها المتغيرات السياسية والاجتماعية والاقتصادية في العالم العربي. إن اختيارنا الروايات والذي تم بناء على مبدأ العشريات جاء من أجل التيقن من التغيرات والتغاير اللذين طرأ على أسلوب الكاتبة في بنائها ورسمها للشخصية المركزية من المنظور الجنسوي، ورصد المتغيرات في توجهاتها ومواقفها الأيديولوجية ورؤيتها للمرأة والرجل على حد سواء عبر كل تلك السنين، أي مراعاة الترتيب الزمني أثناء السترد التقدي من خلال إبراز التسلسل الزمني في كتاباتها. لذا لا مناص من أن يكون منهجنا معتمدا على الانتقاء، متمشيا مع موضوع الدراسة:
With renewed Western interest in the Middle East and Middle Eastern women since September 11th 2001 the discourse surrounding Arab women's oppression, and their supposed inability to resist that ...oppression on their own is becoming prevalent in the West. Through an examination of the novels of Nawal El Saadawi and Hanan Al-Shaykh, this paper seeks to reveal Arab women's writing as an avenue for resistance to male domination. I examine the issues of cultural translation and readership as well as the narrative strategies these authors utilize in their novels. I examine the body as sensual site of reclamation for Arab women. The paper also discusses the authors' criticisms of religious oppressions faced by women in both East and West, and how these oppressions can be linked.
The article builds on the existing dispute between African and African American women writers on the competence of writing about female genital mutilation (FGM), and tries to determine the existence ...and nature of the differences between the writings of these two groups. The author uses comparative analysis of two popular African and African American novels, comparing their ways of describing FGM, its causes and consequences, the level ob objectivity and the style of the narrations.This is followed by a discussion on the reasons for such differences, incorporating a larger circle of both African and African American women authors, at the same time analysing the deviance within the two groups. While the differences between African American writers are not that great, as they mostly fail to present the issue from different points of view, which is often the result of their lack of direct knowledge of the topic, African authors' writing is in itself discovered to be ambivalent and not at all invariable. The reasons for such ambivalence are then discussed in greater context, focusing on the effect of the authors' personal contact with circumcision as well as their knowledge and acceptance of Western values. The author concludes by establishing the African ambivalent attitude towards FGM, which includes different aspects of the issue, as the most significant difference between their and African American writers' description of this practice.
When the life writer has experienced violence, injustice, and political unrest within her region, memoir and testimonial writing requires a process involving the writer as victim and as witness and ...the reader, who also becomes a witness. This multi-layered process is further complicated by patriarchal structures that manipulate cultural values and place the quality of women's lives in jeopardy, which often leads to trauma that the victim revisits throughout her lifetime. Incorporating Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" as illustrated in the novel Beloved based on Margaret Garner's true-life experience of slavery, I explore trauma not as an isolated event, but as part of one's existence throughout a lifetime. Through the memoir Across Boundaries and through other writings by Mamphela Ramphele, I explore the author's writing process with attention to the ways she approaches injustice, violence, and loss. I preface an analysis of Ramphele's memoir with a contextualization of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings, the testimonies of which powerfully represent the extent of injustices suffered by the South African people during the apartheid regime. Ramphele makes the effects of apartheid realistic and relevant in the anthropological research she conducts in the work hostels in Cape Town, and she reveals that the memories she is forced to revisit during the writing process continue to traumatize her. Nawal El Saadawi, a medical doctor in her early career as is Ramphele, also explores violence against women as a form of injustice within the context of dominant cultural norms in her native Egypt and throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Her essays and works of fiction reiterate the recurring theme in her memoir Walking Through Fire that rape, domestic violence, and inadequate health care must decrease if women are to be active participants within a new, democratic society.
This study explores how Muslim Bangladeshi-American women (MBAW) respond to popularized South Asian diaspora literature (SADL). The second-generation children of South Asian immigrants often struggle ...with their bicultural identity. Young girls, specifically, deal with binary constructs associated with gender, religious and cultural norms (Purkayastha, 2005). Some second-generation children began to write these ideas in fiction and non-fiction forms for publication. Subsequently in the 1990s, SADL entered the U.S. mainstream with several texts awarded prestigious recognition, such as the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes. This study explores how the rise of SADL may serve as an educative and reflective vehicle for MBAW to negotiate understandings about their biculturalism. This research inquiry enters through a postcolonial feminist framework to analyze the ways MBAW create hybrid identities (Bhabha, 1994) to resist the Orientalist (Said, 1994) dichotomies between East and West and tradition and modernity. This qualitative study draws out specific themes through a case study methodology. The purposefully selected sample is composed of five women, from similar communities, who participated in two individual interviews each and one focus group. The data were coded and organized according to the research questions and the analysis and interpretation of findings were organized by way of three analytic categories based on the study's conceptual framework: (a) experiences with bicultural identity, (b) identification with literature in their high school English classrooms, (c) perceptions of current SADL. This methodology, incorporating individual storytelling and collaborative dialogue (Minh ha, 1989), fosters not only an important mode of qualitative inquiry, but encourages the role of female coalitions (Mohanty, 2003) and book groups in South Asian communities, and more broadly Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1997) through the integration of diaspora literature. My research revealed that all women in the study struggled with their bicultural identity at various points throughout their high school experience and beyond. Most participants responded that they had not read any SADL until they were in college or older, but when they did, they identified greatly with it. The implications of my study are that certain SADL could offer support to South Asian women and students currently struggling with their bicultural identity.
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