How do Arab women writers, both in Arabic and in English, reflect on the unique challenges and conditions facing women in the Arab world? Critically engaging Hisham Sharabi’s concept of ‘neopatriarchy’ as well as European and Arab literary and psychoanalytic theory, in this book Layla AlAmmar analyses works by canonical authors such as Hanan Al-Shaykh, Fadia Faqir, and Nawal El-Saadawi as well as less well-known voices such as Lamia Ziadé, Arwa Salih, May Ziadeh, and Yasmin El-Rifae. She argues that these text represent neopatriarchal traumas specific to Arab women and offer crucial counternarratives to the erasure and suppression enacted upon them by hegemonic structures. Rejecting the tendency towards ‘redemption’ in postcolonial trauma theory, the book offers a more sober reading of the traumas caused and sustained by conditions of neopatriarchy as well as the oblique modes of resistance evident within these texts. It will be of interest to scholars of Arab, postcolonial, and comparative literature as well as literary trauma theory and gender studies.
