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This academic exercise focuses on
Muslim women's literature, examining issues concerning Muslim
patriarchal gender constructions and the development of
feminist agency within the framework of contemporary Islamic cultures
modernising within the context of globalisation. My analysis will focus
on three contemporary texts, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Fatima Memissi's
memoirs, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood and Fadia Faqir's
novel Pillars of Salt. Even though these texts have not attracted much
critical study, they have great literary value, and this project
subjects them to a reading as feminist literary quests for empowerment
and agency.
This thesis considers the paths along which Muslim feminist
consciousness develops within the diasporic context in Ali's text, and
the Jordanian national context in Faqir's novel. It also studies
Memissi's representation of the harem as a self-contradictory
patriarchal space that actually encourages the formation of an
indigenous Arab Muslim feminist culture.
The project was conceived with the intention of exploring intersections
of nationalist and transnational identity politics, religious ideologies
and gender culture in the Muslim woman's literary imagining of 'modem'
Muslim female subjectivity. Recent texts written originally in English
were selected in order to
focus on the writing of Muslim modem female selfhood within a specific
intercultural historical context that includes the current state of
relations between
the Muslim world and the Atlantic.
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