Download e-book for iPad: Arab-American Women's Writing and Performance: Orientalism, by Somaya Sami Sabry

the general public photograph of Arabs in the United States has been considerably stricken by the ‘war on terror’. yet stereotypes of Arabs, manifested for example in Orientalist representations of Sheherazade and the Arabian Nights in Hollywood and American pop culture, have prevailed much longer. the following Somaya Sabry strains the strong results of racial discourse and 19th- and twentieth-century American Orientalism at the Arab-American event, surroundings the degree for a dialogue of latest Arab-American women’s responses. She exhibits how Arab-American ladies writers and performers confront and subvert racial stereotypes during this charged context, that is additional advanced this present day by way of hostility in the direction of Arabs in post-9/11 America.

How do Arab-American girls writers and performers interrogate primary tropes within the present polarized and ancient second? Sabry means that the determine of Sheherazade and the belief of the Arabian Nights, with their issues of transformation and alter, supply a standard cultural area for the exploration and reinterpretation of those stereotypes around the paintings of latest writers and performers-from Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent to Mohja Kahf’s E-Mails from Scheherazad, from Laila Farah’s dwelling within the Hyphen-Nation to Maysoon Zayid’s stand-up comedy. via shut readings and significant analyses Sabry unearths how every one of those writers and performers interact in various methods with Sheherazadian narrative and orality, and hence forge a situation for cultural translation and negotiation-interrogating stereotypes of oppressed Muslim/Arab girls whilst that they navigate belonging and identification in a hostile/ambivalent surroundings.

Combining literary, cultural and political research, and laying off new gentle on Arab-American women’s negotiations of id, this e-book can be fundamental for all these attracted to the Arab-American global, American ethnic stories and race, in addition to diaspora stories, women’s experiences, literature, cultural experiences and function studies.