Beyond the Nation

Beyond the Nation deals with Third World women’s literary and cinematic intervention in the gendered discourse of the nation through a multicultural feminist reading of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004) and Marziyeh Meshkini’s film The Day I Became a Woman (2000). The book argues for the texts’ production of the discourse of post-gendered nationalism and glocal national identity through subverting the binary logic of nationalist/fundamentalist and imperialist discourses, and charting a synthesis between silence/ speech, private/public, feminine/feminist and local/global.

Riham E.A. Debian is a Lecturer in Alexandria University, Egypt. Her M.A. thesis deals with Arab women's feminism. Her PhD tackles the question of the gender politics of nationalism/fundamentalism and globalization. She participated in a number of international conferences and workshops. She is currently working on the gender politics of Islamism.