Women in the Literary Marketplace: The Anglophone Iranian Novel and the Feminist Subject

2020 ◽  
pp. 260-299
Author(s):  
Karim Mattar

This chapter turns to anglophone Middle Eastern literary production as an increasingly important site for the discursive and representational worlding of the region. I focus on the anglophone Iranian novel, and orient my discussion around questions of gender after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After an overview of diasporic Iranian literary production in the context of geopolitical tensions with the West, I then delve more deeply into representations of gender. I argue that the massive popular and critical acclaim by which Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was met was based on its conformity to and reproduction of the “rogue state” idea of Iran, and its related disavowal of any form of feminism – especially Islamic feminism – other than the secular-liberal or universal. Yasmine Crowther’s and Marjane Satrapi’s (graphic) novels The Saffron Kitchen and Persepolis work against the cosmopolitan literary and political ideals to which Nafisi’s text subscribes, and instead plot trajectories of feminist agency in Iran rooted in and taking their contours from a sense of multiple belonging in nation, religion, family, and profession. They thus bring important Iranian perspectives to bear on the contemporary discussion of Islamic feminism in literature and culture.

Author(s):  
Michael P. Steinberg

This article discusses the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a musical group composed of various musicians from Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries. They show how music is a thing of the world, through their performances of works by various composers, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The article takes a look at the double agenda of the Divan, its pedagogical transformations, and their translations, techniques, and use of melancholy.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rawia Hayik

Conflicts between different religious groups occasionally arise in my Christian and Muslim Israeli-Arab EFL students’ school and area. In an attempt to increase students’ knowledge of and respect for other faiths in the region, I conducted practitioner inquiry research in my religiously diverse Middle-Eastern classroom. Grounded in critical literacy, I used a book set of religion-based literature alongside critical literacy engagements to effect some change in students’ tolerance towards other faiths. This article describes my journey of exploring students’ reader responses to religion-based texts and issues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 502-507
Author(s):  
DANIEL ROBERT KING

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-44
Author(s):  
Shahd Adnan M. Qzeih ◽  
Rafooneh Mokhtarshahi Sani

Wars and conflicts have caused millions of people to seek asylum outside their homelands and the issue of refugee camps has become a pressing subject in international policy discussions. Conflicts continue to escalate in different parts of the world, especially in Middle Eastern countries. In 1948, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict forced displacement of many Palestinian people. The resulting camps have developed into cluster camp shelters of three to four stories in the West Bank, Gaza, and other regions around historical Palestine; some are perceived to be like gated communities. Being self-sufficient environments, refugee camps have rarely been approached from the perspective of urban psychology. This research deals with sensory perceptual analysis of Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank of Palestinian Territories. Balata is situated in Nablus and has raised four generations of refugees since its establishment. In order to explore the spatial characteristics of such specific environmental experiences, the research adopted a mixed-method approach – systematically evaluating the related literature on sensory perceptual spaces and applying content analysis methods. The study modified the sensory slider tool of Malnar and Vodvarka according to the framework matrix based on the content analysis. Moreover, the case study analysis consisted of observation of the chosen area and 30 in-depth interviews with refugees who were forced out of their homes and settled in the camp as well as some who were born in the camp. The research results show that investigating what camp residents perceive of the five senses can capture meaningful sensory perceptual experiences and can generate a holistic mental image of the refugee camp. Particularly, perceptions of the built environment reflect the difficulty of life experiences. The study concludes that the characteristics of camps in this seventy-year-old conflict environment may not be found in other parts of the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahrai Saeed ◽  
Alka M Kanaya ◽  
Louise Bennet ◽  
Peter M Nilsson

Nearly a quarter of the world population lives in the South Asian region (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives). Due to rapid demographic and epidemiological transition in these countries, the burden of non-communicable diseases is growing, which is a serious public health concern. Particularly, the prevalence of pre-diabetes, diabetes and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) is increasing. South Asians living in the West have also substantially higher risk of CVD and mortality compared with white Europeans and Americans. Further, as a result of global displacement over the past three decades, Middle-Eastern immigrants now represent the largest group of non-European immigrants in Northern Europe. This vulnerable population has been less studied. Hence, the aim of the present review was to address cardiovascular risk assessment in South Asians (primarily people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), and Middle-East Asians living in Western countries compared with whites (Caucasians) and present results from some major intervention studies. A systematic search was conducted in PubMed to identify major cardiovascular health studies of South Asian and Middle-Eastern populations living in the West, relevant for this review. Results indicated an increased risk of CVD. In conclusion, both South Asian and Middle-Eastern populations living in the West carry significantly higher risk of diabetes and CVD compared with native white Europeans. Lifestyle interventions have been shown to have beneficial effects in terms of reduction in the risk of diabetes by increasing insulin sensitivity, weight loss as well as better glycemic and lipid control. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.7.3292 How to cite this:Saeed S, Kanaya AM, Bennet L, Nilsson PM. Cardiovascular risk assessment in South and Middle-East Asians living in the Western countries. Pak J Med Sci. 2020;36(7):---------. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.36.7.3292 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy ◽  
Nicholas J. Wheeler

This chapter examines the role of humanitarian intervention in world politics. It considers how we should resolve tensions when valued principles such as order, sovereignty, and self-determination come into conflict with human rights; and how international thought and practice has evolved with respect to humanitarian intervention. The chapter discusses the case for and against humanitarian intervention and looks at humanitarian activism during the 1990s. It also analyses the responsibility to protect principle and the use of force to achieve its protection goals in Libya in 2011. Two case studies are presented, one dealing with humanitarian intervention in Darfur and the other with the role of Middle Eastern governments in Operation Unified Protector in Libya in 2011. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether the West should intervene in Syria to protect people there from the Islamic State (ISIS).


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed El-Bendary

It was the first Gulf War in 1991 which led to the satellite television explosion in the Arab world. Arabs then knew about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait through CNN. Today, Arab satellite channels reach almost every Arab capital and many Middle Eastern and African nations — from Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to Iran in the east, from Syria in the north to Djibouti in the south. This battle for the airwaves and boom in satellite channels in the Arab world has become both a tool for integration and dispersion. It is raising a glimpse of hope that the flow of information will no longer be pouring from the West to the East, but from the East to the West. Questions, however, remain about the credibility of news coverage by Arabic networks like the maverick Qatar-based al-Jazeera and whether Arab journalists adhere to journalistic norms upheld in the West.


Author(s):  
Sanaz Fotouhi

Middle Eastern Muslim men have been historically subjected to stereotypical representations in the West. Although these men are categorically hypervisible for Western audiences as a similar type, among them Iranian men in particular, have been subject to a specific kind of marginalization. Following the 1979 Islamic revolution and the American hostage crisis in Iran, Iranian men and masculinity have become hypervisible as violent and religiously fanatic. While Western discourses of representation contributed greatly to the construction and representation of this specific kind of masculinity which marginalized and stigmatized Iranian men, Iranians themselves, have played a significant role in reaffirming this view. Ironically, contributing most to the reinforcement of this discourse has been Iranian women’s narratives in English in the West, in the form of memoirs and fictional accounts. These popular accounts have played a significant part in marginalizing and emphasizing a hypervisible and stereotypical representation of Iranian men. This paper considers the representation of Iranian men and masculinity as presented through Iranian women’s narratives in the West in English. By drawing on specific narratives and accounts, it examines how socio-political and historical contexts both in the West and in Iran, have led to Iranian women’s representation of Iranian men hypervisibly. Then, through an examination of some narratives by Iranian men, this paper examines how such representations have led to emphasizing the discourse of exclusion and otherness of Iranian men in the West, hampering the actual smooth integration of diasporic Iranian men into their adopted homes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Rudolph ◽  
Roman Seidel

AbstractThe Argument for God’s Existence is one of the major issues in the history of philosophy. It also constitutes an illuminating example of a shared philosophical problem in the entangled intellectual histories of Europe and the Islamic World. Drawing on Aristotle, various forms of the argument were appropriated by both rational Islamic Theology (kalām) and Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna. Whereas the argument, reshaped, refined and modified, has been intensively discussed throughout the entire post-classical era, particularly in the Islamic East, it has likewise been adopted in the West by thinkers such as the Hebrew Polymath Maimonides and the Medieval Latin Philosopher and Theologian Thomas Aquinas. However, these mutual reception-processes did not end in the middle ages. They can be witnessed in the twentieth century and even up until today: On the one hand, we see a Middle Eastern thinker like the Iranian philosopher Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī re-evaluating Kant’s fundamental critique of the classical philosophical arguments for God’s existence, in particular of the ontological proof, and refuting the critique. On the other hand, an argument from creation brought forward by the Islamic Theologian and critic of the peripatetic tradition al-Ghazāli has been adopted by a strand of Western philosophers who label their own version “The Kalām-cosmological Argument”. By discussing important cornerstones in the history of the philosophical proof for God’s existence we argue for a re-consideration of current Eurocentric narratives in the history of philosophy and suggest that such a transcultural perspective may also provide inspiration for current philosophical discourses between Europe, the Middle East and beyond.


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