Contemporary Arab Women’s Life Writing and the Politics of Resistance

Winner of the 2023 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize

Interrogates the relationship between revolutionary movements and experimental life writing forms by contemporary Arab women

• Uniquely interrogates the interplay of power, gender, and resistance in life narratives by politically committed Arab women and explores the strategic function of non-fiction in articulating the role and position of women during crucial historial moments
• Offers a new understanding of Arab life writing as part of a cultural corpus of resistance literature which must be contextualised and understood within specific fields of power
• Brings together critically acclaimed and less familiar texts by Arab women to examine a range of experimental autobiographical modes, including online forms of self-expression
• Covers recent history and ongoing socio-political upheavals with a focus on regional imperatives

In the context of twenty-first century Arab uprisings, women invoke the complexity of their experiences as citizens, revolutionaries, women and writers through a range of narrative strategies. Autobiographical discourses that emerge as part of national revolutionary struggles make audible Arab women’s voices and experiences, foregrounding women as active social and political agents and redefining conventions of self-representation and narration.
Drawing on autobiographical and postcolonial theories, Contemporary Arab Women’s Life Writing and the Politics of Resistance examines contemporary Arab women’s life writing as sites for the articulation of resistance to interlocking power structures and sociocultural and representational norms. Looking comparatively at subgenres of memoir, auto-portrait, testimony, diary and digital life writing across different linguistic and national contexts, this book explores why resistance is important when writing about the self for Arab women and how it is articulated through experimental formal and thematic approaches to the autobiographical genre.