“Double Critique” and the Sufi Praxis of Travel in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage and Fatema Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West

Journeys ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Bernadette Andrea
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
Islamic Feminism ◽  
The West ◽  
Culturally Grounded ◽  
Different Cultures

This article focuses on two twentieth-century Anglophone Arab women writers’ accounts of their travels to “the West”: Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (1999), and Fatema Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (2001). While their engagement with orientalist conceptions of the harem has received some attention, how and why they deploy Sufi texts, concepts, and cosmologies to advance their “double critique” of local and colonial patriarchies has not been subject to a sustained analysis, despite its salience in their travelogues. This article establishes that the Sufi praxis of travel ( safar ) becomes a facilitating framework, and ultimately a methodology derived from culturally grounded ways of knowing and being, for their overdetermined journeys toward what has been called “Islamic feminism.”

scholarly journals SOM E FÉ: DA PRÁTICA COMUNITÁRIA RELIGIOSA PARA A COMPLEXIDADE DO PENSAMENTO MUSICAL ERUDITO DO ÚLTIMO QUARTEL DO SÉC. XX

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
José Luís Postiga
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The West ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
Musical Concepts ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Western Classical Music

When faced with the artistic-musical concepts developed in the second half of the twentieth century, it is common to observe them from the perspective of the scientific advances they have promoted or resulted from, the abstract organizations in which they are based, the aesthetic principles they create or and almost always fall within the individuality of the interpretation present in the creative act and its representativeness, regardless of the support in which it presents itself. Paradoxically, some of the main classical musical works written in the last quarter of the twentieth century resulted from the musicological study and/or musical representation of concepts, rites, religious practices representative of different cultures of the West and especially the East. In this sense, throughout the present article will be addressed works by composers of Western classical music, such as the case of Jonathan Harvey and Tristan Murail, characteristics of the musical currents that fit, from serialism to spectralism, as well as acoustic and electronic casts, which result. reinterpretations of religious practices of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as sound behaviors of the communicative practice of peoples, such as the songs and instruments of Tibet and Mongolia.

scholarly journals Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Trudier Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Moment

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

PROVINCE, METROPOLIS, AND THE LITERARY CAREER OF PHYLLIS BENTLEY IN THE 1930s*

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVE RUSSELL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
The West ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Cultural Setting ◽  
Home Town ◽  
Vera Brittain

ABSTRACTIn spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

Revolutionary Memoirs: Assia Djebar and Latifa al-Zayyat

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahia Abdel Nasser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Assia Djebar ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Algerian War Of Independence ◽  
National Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Nation

This chapter focuses on the autobiographical novels and memoirs of two important twentieth-century Arab women writers who provide models for the adaptation of the genre in colonial and postcolonial cultures: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Nowhere in My Father’s House, two Francophone autobiographical novels by Algerian writer Assia Djebar, and The Search: Personal Papers, a memoir in Arabic by Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat. By framing autobiographical production in anticolonial national movements, Djebar and al-Zayyat rework the genre to comment on postcolonial cultures. Both writers contest colonial formations and offer revolutionary representations of solitude in the postcolonial nation: the Francophone Algerian writer’s challenge to the French archive of the Algerian War of Independence and the Egyptian writer’s reexamination of national culture and the history of the 1940s student movement. In the chapter, solitude is read as an emancipatory opportunity when the writers rethink the language of the new nation through autobiography.

scholarly journals Empowering Muslims in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
The Veil

Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent aspects of contemporary Arabic culture(s) in their literary works and diasporic Arab women writers have represented Islam even more differently in their works. The study investigates how Islam is portrayed in the fiction of two diasporic Arab women writers, Leila Aboulela (b. 1964- ) and Mohja Kahf. (1967- ). General literary research has been conducted on these two writers and how they represent Islam in their writing; however, firstly, most of the conducted literature is about the veil and what it adds to Muslim women living in the West. Secondly, most of the previous research tackles each writer alone. Nevertheless, the current study is predominantly different as it shows how Islam is represented in both Aboulela’s Minaret (2004) and Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) as a religion that provides an ethical pathway and empowers its adherents socially, politically and psychologically, thus lending purpose to one’s life. It also fills the gap in discussing the works of two writers from different backgrounds and in different settings and contexts in one study.

scholarly journals Creativity and Dissidence in Jordanian Women’s Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (33A) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Omnia Amin
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Arab Women ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Traditions

Contemporary Jordanian women writers have transported the act of writing into an act of dissidence to reflect their own perspectives and priorities shaped by a distinctive cultural and aesthetic formation. Writers like Huzama Habayeb, Afaf Batayneh, and Leila Elatrash speak with assertive voices about the confinement and even the abuse of Arab women. Their works reveal an unequivocal sense of pride in overthrowing all confinements, while at the same time condemning and combating the abusive excesses of patriarchy when it appropriates and exploits religious and cultural traditions to preserve its own material hegemony. Their discourse strives, with varying degrees of militancy, for an agenda that is quite dissident and threatening to the fabric of the traditional religious and social Arab norms. Some look at the West for a substitute model of their freedom of expression, while others seek an answer within the framework of Arabic culture. Their writing represents not only a fascinating phenomenon of articulating feelings and perspectives of their own by adopting a dissident stance in their use of language and narrative, but also a promise to extend and expand their scope of focus to an apparent militant and confrontational response to the discourse produced by male-made theocracies.

Studying Modern Arabic Literature

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Modern Arabic

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

Marie Ulčová and her Contribution to the West Bohemian Museums

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Nela Štorková
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
West Bohemia ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Second World

While today the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region represents just one of the departments of the Museum of West Bohemia in Pilsen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in 1915, it emerged as an independent institution devoted to a study of life in the Pilsen region. Ladislav Lábek, the founder and long-time director, bears the greatest credit for this museum. This study presents PhDr. Marie Ulčová, who joined the museum shortly after the Second World War and in 1963 replaced Mr. Lábek on his imaginary throne. The main objective of this article is to introduce the personality of Marie Ulčová and to evaluate the activity of this Pilsen ethnographer and the museum employee with an emphasis on her work in the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region. The basic aspects of the ethnographic activities, not only of Marie Ulčová but also of the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region in the years 1963–1988, are described through her professional and popularising articles, archival sources and contemporary periodicals.

Century of Ukraine's diplomatic service

2017 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Yuriy Makar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Committee ◽  
The West ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National University ◽  
Central Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

On December 22, 2017 the Ukrainian Diplomatic Service marked the 100thanniversary of its establishment and development. In dedication to such a momentous event, the Department of International Relations of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University has published a book of IR Dept’s ardent activity since its establishment. It includes information both in Ukrainian and English on the backbone of the collective and their versatile activities, achievements and prospects for the future. The author delves into retracing the course of the history of Ukrainian Diplomacy formation and development. The author highlights the roots of its formation, reconsidering a long way of its development that coincided with the formation of basic elements of Ukrainian statehood that came into existence as a result of the war of national liberation – the Ukrainian Central Rada (the Central Council of Ukraine). Later, the Ukrainian or so-called State the Hetmanate was under study. The Directorat (Directory) of Ukraine, being a provisional collegiate revolutionary state committee of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was given a thorough study. Of particular interest for the research are diplomatic activities of the West Ukrainian People`s Republic. Noteworthy, the author emphasizes on the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic’s foreign policy, forced by the Bolshevist Russia. A further important implication is both the challenges of the Ukrainian statehood establishing and Ukraine’s functioning as a state, first and foremost, stemmed from the immaturity and conscience-unawareness of the Ukrainian society, that, ultimately, has led to the fact, that throughout the twentieth century Ukraine as a statehood, being incorporated into the Soviet Union, could hardly be recognized as a sovereign state. Our research suggests that since the beginning of the Ukrainian Diplomacy establishment and its further evolution, it used to be unprecedentedly fabricated and forged. On a wider level, the research is devoted to centennial fight of Ukraine against Russian violence and aggression since the WWI, when in 1917 the Russian Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, started real Russian war against Ukraine. Apropos, in the about-a-year-negotiation run, Ukraine, eventually, failed to become sovereign. Remarkably, Ukraine finally gained its independence just in late twentieth century. Nowadays, Russia still regards Ukraine as a part of its own strategic orbit,waging out a carrot-and-stick battle. Keywords: The Ukrainian People’s Republic, the State of Ukraine, the Hetmanate, the Direcorat (Directory) of Ukraine, the West Ukrainian People`s Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, Ukraine, the Bolshevist Russia, the Russian Federation, Ukrainian diplomacy

Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

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