Taylor, Lisa K. & Zine, Jasmin (dir.), Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy. Contested Imaginaries in Post-9/11 Cultural Practice, New York, Routledge, 2014, 316p.

The decade since 9/11 has seen an accelerated circulation and enthusiastic reception of representations of Muslim women’s lives. Marketed as a vehicle of intercultural understanding within the context of the “war on terror”, these representations are neither random nor innocent but rather reflect and participate in a long Orientalist and imperialist history. Contributors to this volume examine the hegemonic and contested global production and reception of narrative and visual representations of Muslim and Arab women’s lives in literature, poetry, cinema, television, visual art, and popular culture as well as college classrooms.

This edited collection provides a timely exploration of transnational and anticolonial feminist analyses that can work against sensationalized and stereotypical representations of Muslim women. It addresses the gap in contemporary conversations on the teaching of literary and cultural texts by and about Muslim and Arab women, bringing scholars from the fields of education, literary and cultural studies, and Muslim women’s studies to examine the politics and ethics of transnational anti-colonial reading practices and pedagogy.

The book is unique in bringing scholarship in conversation with interviews with Muslim and Arab women artists and cultural producers reflecting on the transformative role of the arts as a form of critical public pedagogy and the larger context shaping/addressed by their practice.

“This timely collection illuminates the impact ‘on the ground’ of popular neo-Orientalist representations of Muslim and Arab women, attending to the politicised market forces that materially shape the ‘reading encounter’. Providing fascinating case studies from book groups to children’s fiction, from television to theatre, and interviewing cultural producers from magazine editors to visual artists, contributors mix textual analysis and reception studies to layout out with alarming clarity the impact of civilisational stereotypes on the lives of Muslim and non-Muslim women and girls. Rarely have I seen the politics of reading and cultural consumption explored with such finesse and such compelling urgency.”

-Reina Lewis (University of the Arts, London)

Introduction: The Contested Imaginaries of Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back

1 SUR/VEIL: The Veil as Blank(et) Signifier

2 Khamosh Pani: Reading Partition Muslim Masculinities and Femininities in an Age of Terror

3 Breaking the Stigma? The Antiheroine in Fatih Akın’s Head-On

4 Pedagogies of Solidarity in Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since”

5 “A Too-Quick Enthusiasm for the Other”: North American Women’s Book Clubs and the Politics of Reading

6 Of Activist Fandoms, Auteur Pedagogy, and Imperial Feminism: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to I Am Du’a Khalil

7 Cartographies of Difference and Pedagogies of Peril: Muslim Girls and Women in Western Young Adult Fiction Novels

8 “Shaking Up” Vision: The Video Diary as Personal and Pedagogical Intervention in Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance

9 From Empathy to Estrangement, from Enlightenment to Implication: A Pedagogical Framework for (Re)Reading Literary Desire against the “Slow Acculturation of Imperialism”

10 Interview with Mohja Kahf

11 Interview with Zarqa Nawaz

12 Interview with Rasha Salti

13 Interview with Tayyibah Taylor

14 Interview with Sofia Baig

15 Interview with Sahar Ullah

16 Interview with Jamelie Hassan