Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women?s Writing from across the Middle East (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899–1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923–1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

Feroza Jussawalla has taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and is Full Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1984), co-editor of Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World, (1992), and ed., Conversations with V.S. Naipaul (1997), and Emerging South Asian Women Writers (2017).

Doaa Omran did her Master’s and PhD at the University of New Mexico (2019). She wrote her ground-breaking dissertation titled Female Hero Mega-Archetypes in the Medieval European Romance on Quranic and Biblical female characters as mega-archetypes in Medieval literature. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the same university where she received her Master’s and doctorate. She received her BA in English language and literature at Alexandria University, Egypt. Her awards include: a Fulbright Scholarship (2007), the Women of Color award at UNM (2012), Dean of Graduate Studies Dissertation Award (2016) and first place in the Larry Morris Memorial Scholarship (2018). Her essay "Anachronism and Anatopism in the French Vulgate Cycle and the Forging of English Identity through Othering Muslims/Saracens" is included in Albrecht Classen’s edited volume Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation (2018).