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Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context

Anastasia Valassopoulos’s study sets itself the ambitious aim of wresting Arab women’s writing from some of the reductive frameworks that have hampered existing criticism in order to read literary texts at once for their formal experimentation and for their theoretical innovation. The book opens with the observation that Arab women’s texts have too often been read appreciatively and condescendingly, with a lack of proper conceptual analysis. Valassopoulos’s response to this deficiency is to assess her chosen works as “cultural expression in context”, which means that she pays due attention to their socio-political contexts without reducing the works to these contexts, and that she also explores the ways in which they engage with wider issues. Refusing to overemphasise questions of faith and ethnicity, for example, she argues that her texts should be read “for their experiences of location, cultural influence, the expression of national identity, the experience of sexuality, the performance of gender roles and the interrogation of and responses to colonial discourse and postcolonial theory” (p. 4). This broad understanding of context not just as the socio-political backdrop, but also the whole arena of theoretical and cultural considerations that impact on Arab women writers leads to a series of highly intelligent, dynamic and engaging readings. There is no specific agenda or hobby horse guiding this study, then, but a commitment to the complexity of the texts themselves, together with a subtle grasp of the range of critical debates with which they can be seen to engage. The first chapter focuses on the notion of women’s writing, and serves both as a lucid introductory framework for the readings that follow and as a provocative dialogue with feminist studies more broadly. Valassopoulos examines a series of existing approaches to Arab women’s writing and identifies the pitfalls of various sorts of feminist criticism. She reveals, for example, the dangers of applying too specific a feminist framework to Arab literature, since this can result in the misapplication of Western feminist modes of thinking (such as a focus on the individual) on the Arab context. Conversely, however, she notes that there is no contestatory “Arab feminism” as such, since the very term has been associated with “the West” in contradistinction to “the East”, and, in any case, “there is still ‘no fully acceptable’ term for feminism or feminist in Arabic” (p. 20). Moreover, feminist post-colonial theory, which sets out precisely to deal with these sorts of issues, has, according to Valassopoulos, still JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2–3 (APRIL–JULY 2012)