Writing Off the Beaten Track: Reflections on the Meaning of Travel and Culture in the Middle East (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East) - Hardcover

Caesar, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815629575 ISBN 13: 9780815629573

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 2002

Synopsis

These thought-provoking essays provide insightful reflection on both the experience and the condition of experiencing another culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Judith Caesar is associate professor of English and chair of the English Department at American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. She is the author Crossing Borders: An American Woman in the Middle East, also published by Syracuse University Press.

From Publishers Weekly:

Caesar (Crossing Borders: An American Woman in the Middle East) is a well-intentioned but disappointing narrator who fails in an attempt to extrapolate from her experiences teaching English at a university in the United Arab Emirates to a larger commentary on the Middle East. Despite 10 years in the region, she comes across as wide-eyed. Rather than the "muddle east," a term used by her expatriate friends in Saudi Arabia (where Caesar has lived), in the Emirates she finds "a kind of melded east": she marvels at women with abayahs (veils) and cell phones, and finds it surprising that she is able to sit "in a French-named coffee shop in an American-style shopping mall in Dubai drinking Italian espresso." She is disappointed to find middle America in the Middle East, but she is content to repeat predictable stories with little analysis or context, based on conversations with expatriate teachers or their spouses and with a handful of her restive students. Caesar does not claim to be an expert, and some of her thoughts on travel in general are perceptive, though a little wooden-"I liked living in other cultures because it made me question what I thought I knew." Her more observant anecdotes are about what it is to be an American abroad and how travel has made her more aware of issues in America-like poverty, misogyny and hate crimes-that she had previously been blind to.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0815629575
• ISBN 13: 9780815629573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192