Imprisonment in Contemporary Arab Fiction: A Feminist Reading
Free 10-Week Online Seminar
Hosted on Zoom – Register for Link
Every Wednesday, March 6 – May 8, 2024
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET
Course Description:
This 10-week seminar will examine depictions and recordings of imprisonment in contemporary Arabic literature, with particular attention to works written by female Arab novelists. As Arab prison literature gains importance due to the lack of alternative records about prisons and detainees, feminist prison literature represents an important sector of the genre, telling the stories of violations endured by women in prison, which so often go untold due to political surveillance, cultural pressures, and traditional repression they face post-incarceration. Participants will analyze contemporary Arab novels, authors, and real-world examples of imprisonment to better understand this increasingly prominent form of women’s cultural production.
With civil society and human rights organizations being suppressed in many countries, novels and literature become a crucial alternative narrative to the state’s official discourse. Beyond creative expressions, these literary works contribute to the historical record, often delving into experiences of torture, and providing insight far beyond the statistics of human rights reports.
Seminar Co-Leaders:
Dr. Mansour Al-Maswari
Dr. Mansour Ali M. Al-Maswari is a Yemeni academic and faculty member at Amran University, Yemen. He holds a Ph.D. in English with a focus on Comparative Literature, as well as two master’s degrees—one in Political Science and the other in English. In 2023, he was awarded the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University, CGC-Amman. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at MESA Global Academy.
Dr. Sulaiman Taan
Dr. Sulaiman Taan was an assistant professor in the Arabic Department at Al-Baath University, where he taught classes on pre-Islamic literature, Umayyad literature, and literary text analysis. Taan worked at Gaziosmanpaşa University in Turkey. His research interests include Arabic studies, cultural studies of the Middle East and the Arab world, media, drama, and communications.
More Information
Participants who attend at least 8 out of 10 complete seminar sessions will receive a certificate of satisfactory completion signed by the Dean of The New School for Social Research. In order to obtain the certificate, participants must register and log in with the same email address each week.
Registration will remain open for the duration of the seminar. Registrants will receive a reminder email with the Zoom link each week. The seminar sessions will be recorded and available to registrants on Vimeo the following week.
Schedule, Syllabus, and Readings
| Week 1: March 6 | The Phenomenon of Prison Literature in Arabic Fiction Elimelekh, Geula. Arabic Prison Literature: Resistance, Torture, Alienation and Freedom. Göttingen: Otto Harrassowitz (2014) |
| Week 2: March 13 | Prison Issues in Arabic Fiction Booth, M. “Women’s prison memoirs in Egypt and Elsewhere: Prison, Gender, Praxis, Middle East Report” (November–December). (1987) |
| Week 3: March 20 | Political Framework for the Egyptian Prison Novel Robert Springborg, Egypt. |
| Week 4: March 27 | Nawal El-Saadawi Rajendra Chetty, Women Warriors and Female Community in the Prison Writings of Fatima Meer and Nawal El Saadawi. |
| Week 5: April 3 | Political Conflict in Syria and the Emergence of Prison Literature Hopwood, D. Syria 1945–1986: Politics and Society (London: Unwin Hyman). 1988 |
| Week 6: April 10 | Rosa Yassin Hasan R. Shareah Taleghani, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature- The Poetics of Human Rights. |
| Week 7: April 17 | Political Transformations and the Phenomenon of Prison Literature in Iraq Nadje Al-Ali, Conspiracy of Near Silence: Violence Against Iraqi Women. (2011) Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba’thists, and Free Officers. |
| Week 8: April 24 | Haifa Zangana Rima Hasouneh, Haifa Zangana: Woman on a Journey from Baghdad to London. Journal of Middle East Women Studies (2009) |
| Week 9: May 1 | Authoritarian Monarchy in Morocco Aziz BineBine, Tazmamart 18 Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison. Translated by Lulu Norman, Tazmamart prison. Salah Moukhlis, The Forgotten Face of Post-coloniality: Moroccan Prison Narratives, Human Rights, and the Politics of Resistance. California State University (2008) |
| Week 10: May 8 | Malika Oufkir Eileen M. Meagher, Telling Their Stories: Women Construct/Instruct through Survival Rhetoric. University of Tennessee (2003) Alicia Kozameh, Survival and Resistance in Steps under Water. (1996) Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy, Malika Oufkir’s Stolen Lives. (1999) |