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Hanadi Al-Samman. Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma Authorship and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. ix + 256 pages, works cited, index. Cloth US$39.95 ISBN 978-0-8156-3402-7.

Two very different female figures from Arab cultural and literary history structure Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma Authorship and the Diaspora in ArabWomen’s Writings—Shahrazad (Scheherazade) and the mawʾūdah (the buried infant girl). Hanadi Al-Samman’s study uses these figures and the tropes they activate—female infanticide by burial and women’s storytelling traditions— to read a range of fictional works by contemporary Arab women authors, all of Syrian and Lebanese origin, who write in Arabic but live in the diaspora (Paris and London). Al-Samman states that her “paramount goal” in Anxiety of Erasure is “an examination of how diaspora Arab women writers activate these two tropes to reflect the endless possibilities of death and rebirth, of social and political engagement, in order to ignite a revolution on the personal and political levels” (9). She further explains that her intention in amplifying thesewomen’s voices it to reclaim the corpus of “their foremother Shahrazad through revisiting the traumatic sites of the pre-Islamic waʾd tradition” (13). The book opens with three relatively short introductory chapters: the first sets up the mawʾūdah and Shahrazad as, in Al-Samman’s words, “icons of erasure and revolutionary resurrection;” the second is an overview of Arab womenwriters and the diaspora experience, including North and South America in addition to Europe; and the third looks at how these figures help to understand Arab women’s authorship as trauma and working against “erasure.” The five chapters that follow are more detailed readings of novels by Ghada Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida Naʿnaʿ, Hoda Barakat and Salwa al-Neimi. The last of these discusses Neimi’s poetry as well as two novels. The book’s very interesting postscript briefly discusses the work of Samar Yazbek. The book is well structured and argued, offering rich readings of these texts that benefit greatly not only from the framework Al-Samman develops