Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism articles from March 2006

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism archives from March 2006

Preface.(Nawal el Saadawi on her services for women's rights)
March 22, 2006... When the renowned Egyptian physician-psychiatrist, writer, and activist Nawal el Saadawi first told me of her plans to hold a conference entitled "Women, Creativity, and Dissidence" in Cairo, Egypt, in 2005, I immediately envisioned devoting...

Introduction: sideline insurgencies and gendered art.
March 22, 2006... Fiction has never been entertainment for me; it has been the work I have done for most of my adult life. I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information is via narrative. --Toni Morrison 1993 ...

The seventh international AWSA conference: rationale and the wag forward.(Arab Women Solidarity Association)(Conference news)
March 22, 2006... Why the Conference? In May 2005 approximately two hundred men and women from four continents participated in a conference called "Women, Creativity, and Dissidence" that I convened in Cairo, Egypt, under the aegis of the Arab Women...

To be singularly nomadic or a territorialized national: at the crossroads of francophone women's writing of the Maghreb.
March 22, 2006... The terms "postcoloniality," "alterity," "nomadism," and "deterritorializing," as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have brilliantly shown us, are familiarly used to represent the non-Western, nonwhite European, Othered novel of our era. The...

Feminist or simply feminine? Reflections on the works of Nana Asma'u, a nineteenth-century West African woman poet, intellectual, and social activist.
March 22, 2006... Introduction Nana Asma'u, a remarkable West African Islamic woman poet, intellectual, and social activist who flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century, offers an alternative to the popular stereotype that the Qur'an and the...

Outrageous behavior: women's public performance in North Africa.
March 22, 2006... Merriam-Webster defines the word "outrage" as, one: "an act of brutality or violence," two: "injury," "insult," or "an act that violates accepted standards of behavior or taste," and three: "the anger and resentment aroused by injury or...

Blurred genres, blended memories: engendering dissidence in Nawal el Saadawi's Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Is it possible to read some African women's novels as instances of a complex amalgamation of the self, the social, and the political even when such novels do not on the first encounter confront us as autobiographical writing? Can some African...

Politics by other means: two Egyptian artists, Gazbia Sirry and Ghada Amer.
March 22, 2006... This essay reconsiders the work of two artists, Gazbia Sirry and Ghada Amer, who belong to two different generations and who in their work have demonstrated the significance of the voice of women in debates about nation and citizenship,...

The price of dissidence: a meditation on creativity, censorship, and exile.(price of freedom)
March 22, 2006... What is the sense of living on as one's own shadow? We are ghosts or memories. --Stefan Zweig Exchanging One Prison Cell for Another At the end of my novel Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl (Lina: Lawhat Fatat Dimashqiya),...

Durable dreams: dissent, critique, and creativity in Faat Kine and Moolaade.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Introduction Ousmane Sembene's oeuvre, in many ways, grants African feminism a legitimacy of its own, denying recurrent attempts to fit it within valorized, largely Western, templates for liberation. Not surprising, Faat Kine (2001) and...

African literature and the woman: the imagined reality as a strategy of dissidence.
March 22, 2006... Whenever transformation becomes necessary in human society, it must begin with some kind of alteration or fixing of an internal cartography, or what David Punter calls "violent geographics" (2000, 29) in Postcolonial Imaginings. African...

Guantanamo: a feminist perspective on U.S. human rights violations.(Guantanamo, Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, play)
March 22, 2006... The Play On 24 May 2004 in London our play Guantanamo, Honour Bound to Defend Freedom opened in Tricycle, a small London theater. It is a play using only the words of the families of British prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, their...

Dissidence, creativity, and embargo art in Nuha Al-Radi's Baghdad Diaries.
March 22, 2006... For almost a full decade, an inhuman campaign of sanctions--the most complete ever in recorded history--has destroyed Iraq as a modern state, decimated its people, and ruined its agriculture, its educational and health care systems, as well...