Arabic-L:LIT:Call:Contested Imaginaries: Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 22 May 2006
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Call for Contributions:Contested Imaginaries: Reading  
Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back

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1)
Date: 22 May 2006
From:Afra Al-Mussawir <afraalmussawir at yahoo.com>
Subject:Call for Contributionsl:Contested Imaginaries: Reading Muslim  
Women and Muslim Women Reading Back

Dear Colleagues,

We would greatly appreciate your circulating this as widely as
possible.
Thank you!!

Lisa Taylor, Hilary Davis and Jasmin Zine
=========================================================

Special Issue of Intercultural Education:


   CONTESTED IMAGINARIES
   Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back:
   Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical
Concerns
    Guest Editors: Lisa Taylor, Hilary Davis and Jasmin Zine


   Call for Abstracts:

   This special issue traces its origins to a conference panel
examining the
reception and teaching of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi�s
memoir
within an Islamophobic global context in which Muslim women are
increasingly
the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination produced
through a
complex nexus of societal and imperial aggression. A proliferation of
literary and cultural production about Muslim women in the form of
memoirs,
fiction, children�s literature and non-fiction both challenges and
perpetuates the currency of Orientalist writing and representation.
Within
the context of the current global and geo-political landscape and the
�War
on Terror,� competing imaginaries: -- Western imperialist,
Orientalist as
well as feminist, anti-colonial, and Islamic -- form a contested
terrain of
knowledge production upon which the lives, histories and
subjectivities of
Muslim women are discursively constituted, debated, claimed and
consumed
through a variety of literary, academic and visual forms of
representation

   This special issue seeks to examine critically how these forms of
representation are taken up in various educational sites and also to
interrogate and reflect on pedagogies which focus on the politics and
ethics
of reading. We invite scholarly papers that explore the literary,
academic
and cultural genres through which Muslim women are represented in
relation
to the pedagogical considerations, ethical concerns and political
challenges
arising from them. We are interested in the different facets of the
politics
of reception and the resulting tensions which must be negotiated by
both
Western and Muslim readers � i.e. not only responses which

challenge

neo-Orientalist and Islamaphobic narratives but also those which
grapple
with conservative Islamist narratives.  Our overall aim is to explore
the
pedagogic possibilities opened up by readings which are
transnational,
feminist, and anti-colonial.
   .
   Engaging the problematic described here, papers are invited that
examine
(but are not limited to) the intersection of the following:

     a.. Feminist & postcolonial pedagogies of reading the

�activated

colonial divide� (Said) in different institutional and geographical
settings
within the global context of gendered Islamophobia and Western
imperialism
     b.. Muslim women�s literary or cultural production and the
complex
subject positions and forms of community and agency imagined and
re-membered
therein
     c.. Reading and writing back: Muslim women�s literary, cultural
and
academic knowledge production as counter-hegemonic pedagogies
     d.. Western produced literature about Muslim women or girls in
the
Middle East, Africa and South or Western Asia including children�s
literature and the structures of feeling, practices of reading and
reading
communities these invite
     e.. Publishing & marketing strategies targeting literature
by/concerning
Muslim women  in the Middle East, Africa and South and Western Asia
     f.. Cultural and literary production which contests Western
imaginaries
of  Muslim women
     g.. The reception of literature by/concerning  Muslim women
amongst book
clubs and popular feminist reading practices
     h.. Reading and representing Muslim women: stories of
teaching/learning
from K-12 classrooms
     i.. The politics, problematics and practice of anti-Orientalist
and
anti-colonial readings
     j.. Muslim women in Islamist writings: Anti-patriarchal readings
as
pedadogical praxis

   Abstracts of  250 words are invited to be submitted electronically
to the
address below by June 30 2006. Please provide a brief bio with your
abstract. Abstracts will be subject to peer review and selected
authors will
be invited to submit complete manuscripts for peer review by November
1,
2006. The special issue will be published in November, 2007.

   Submit abstracts to: intercultural_imaginaries at yahoo.com.

   Questions may be directed to the guest editors:
   Lisa Taylor,                  ltaylor at ubishops.ca
   Hilary E. Davis,            hilarydavis at sympatico.ca
   Jasmin Zine,                  jzine at wlu.ca

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End of Arabic-L:  22 May 2006