Arabic-L:LIT:Need a Panel Member

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 21 Sep 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Need a Panel Member

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1)
Date: 21 Sep 1999
From: Aida Bamia <abamia at aall.ufl.edu>
Subject: Need a Panel Member

Dear list members:
I received this message from a student. If anyone is interested please
contact her directly.
Thank you.
Aida Bamia

I write now because one of the
presenters for a  conference panel I am on at this year's SCMLA cannot,
after all, make the conference.  Lori Rowlett, in religious studies at
the University of Wisconsin at Eau-Claire, attended the conference at
which I gave the paper you helped me to think through.  Dissatisfied
with the under-representation of Islam in UW-Eau Claire's Department of
Religious Studies, she suggested we collaborate on a panel devoted
entirely Muslim Women's Voices.  Since one of the presenters has had to
drop out, I am writing to see if you might know of somebody whose work
fits this panel and who might want to take the place of our third
presenter.  I've included the call for papers and a description of my
presentation with this mail.  The conference is in Memphis, Tennessee
October 28th-30th; our panel is scheduled for Friday, October 29, 2:15
p.m. – 3:45 p.m.  The conference information is located at:

http://www-english.tamu.edu/scmla/newsletter/01.html

If you know of any possible replacements, you can contact me at:
Lori Amy
lamy at gasou.edu
Georgia Southern University
Department of Writing and Linguistics
P.O. Box 8026
Statesboro, GA 30456
(912) 681-0625

Thank you,
Lori Amy

Session on Muslim Women's Voices: the Intersection of Gender and Islam

In the West, we are often presented with stereotypes of Muslim women as
passive, oppressed unmmodern (premodern?) and exotically mysterious. The
reality,
however, is different. We are interested in papers (or abstracts) on
Muslim women writers, in which Islamic voices speak for themselves. The
works explored may be fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Welcome also are
papers on Muslim voices (female)
which speak through film, dance, theater or the visual arts. We are NOT
interested in papers which criticize Muslim culture(s) from Western
perspectives.

Towards a Feminist Ethnography

Gayatri Spivak argues that the subaltern, by virtue of being subaltern,
*cannot* speak. This implies that, in order for the subtaltern's
interests to be represented to dominant (largely western) power
structures, representatives of the
dominant cultural group *must* speak on her behalf. "To speak" on
"behalf" of the subaltern entails, in some form or another, the
methodology of ethnography. However, as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin
caution, the relationship
between feminism and ethnography is ambivalent at best. Ethnography
always invokes the exploitative relatiohship between the
researcher/subject and the object of study, between the interviewer who
holds what Pierre Bourdieu calls
legitimate symbolic power and the interviewee, without access to the
symbolic power structures through which the ethnographer represents her
object of study. While acknowledging the problems and contradictions
with which ethnography is fraught, we must nevertheless also acknowledge
that *not* representing subaltern voices presents even larger ethical
issues for a feminist politics. Since ethnography seems to be one of the
most viable mediums for this representation, feminists must strategize
an ethnographic methodology that does not appropriate or subsume the
voice of the other and that does not pretend to speak an objective truth
about the other. A postmodern global feminist ethnography must proceed
without reinscribing the master discourse position of imperialism while
at the same time not falling into the equally dangerous trap of cultural
relativism. This presentation, then, is an attempt to strategize a
feminist ethnographic methodoly. It asks, first and foremost, how
members of dominant cultural groups can use dialogues with members of
marginalized groups to move towards positions of self-interrogation, to
reflect on our self-definitions, and to examine how our identity
constructions are bound with our stereotypical constructions of the
"other." This presentation relies heavily on video clips of these
exploratory dialogues, and invites conference participants to enter
into the dialogic space opened up through the video clips.

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End of Arabic-L: 21 Sep 1999