Email from Scheherazad

Email from Scheherazad PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Arab American women
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description

Email from Scheherazad

Email from Scheherazad PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Arab American women
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Get Book Here

Book Description


E-mails from Scheherazad

E-mails from Scheherazad PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher: University of Central Florida
ISBN: 9780813026213
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Explores what it is like to be a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, and a headscarf-wearing Muslim in a non-Muslim country.

Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts

Troubling Topics, Sacred Texts PDF Author: Roberta Sterman Sabbath
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110650614
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
Abrahamic scriptures serve as cultural pharmakon, prescribing what can act as both poison and remedy. This collection shows that their sometimes veiled but eternally powerful polemics can both destroy and build, exclude and include, and serve as the ultimate justification for cruelty or compassion. Here, scholars not only excavate these works for their formative and continuing cultural impact on communities, identities, and belief systems, they select some of the most troubling topics that global communities continue to navigate. Their analysis of both texts and their reception help explain how these texts promote norms and build collective identities. Rejecting the notion of the sacred realm as separate from the mundane realm and beyond critical challenge, this collection argues—both implicitly and sometimes transparently—for the presence of the sacred within everyday life and open to challenge. The very rituals, prayers, and traditions that are deemed sacred interweave into our cultural systems in infinite ways. Together, these authors explore the dynamic nature of everyday life and the often-brutal power of these texts over everyday meaning.

Hagar Poems

Hagar Poems PDF Author: Mohja Kahf
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1682260003
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
“Mohja Kahf ’s Hagar Poems is brilliantly original in its conception, thrillingly artful in its execution. Its range is immense, its spiritual depth is profound, it negotiates its shifts between archaic and the contemporary with utmost skill. There’s lyricism, there’s satire, there’s comedy, there’s theology of a high order in this book.” —Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book “Hagar/ Hajar the immigrant/exile/outcast/refugee mother of a people is given multiple voices and significance in Mohja Kahf’s new book of dramatic monologues, which also reinvents Pharaoh’s daughter, Zuleika, Aïsha, and Mary in poems that are at once lively and learned, agnostic and devout. The sequence on an American mosque, and the poet’s ambivalent love for what it represents, is unique in American poetry.” —Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger’s Mirror “‘Where have all the goddesses gone,’ writes Mohja Kahf, ‘I tracked down Isis / incognito on Cyprus. /She told me Ishtar / lived under the radar / in southern Iraq. . . .’ In Hagar Poems, Mohja Kahf’s hallmark qualities—irreverence, imagination, wit, poignancy—are all exuberantly in evidence. A wonderful read.” —Leila Ahmed, author of A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America “This brilliant collection captures all the ‘patient threading of relationship’ between Hagar and Sarah as between women, and then between women and men, between human and God. . . . At every turn of the page [Kahf] refuses complacency and circumstance but opts instead for exposing the tenuousness of threads that tie and bind and then come loose before our eyes.” —From the foreword by Amina Wadud The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah—the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts. Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar’s story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.

Who Defines Me

Who Defines Me PDF Author: Eid Mohamed
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862037
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Who Defines Me: Negotiating Identity in Language and Literature is a collection of insightful articles that represent an interdisciplinary study of identity. The articles start from the premise that identity is, and always has been, unstable and mutable; which is to say that identity is constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed – only to be deconstructed and reconstructed again, in turn to be deconstructed and reconstructed (and so on ad infinitum). Time and place are variables. So, too – as Who Defines Me underscores – are ethnicity, religion, politics and power, race and color, nationality, gender, culture, language, and socio-economic status. With all of these variables in mind, Who Defines Me focuses on language and literature as the portal through which identity is explored. The overarching rubrics under which the explorations are conducted are Arabs and Muslims, race identity in America, and language identity.

Contemporary Arab-American Literature

Contemporary Arab-American Literature PDF Author: Carol Fadda-Conrey
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479826677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state. Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

Spectacle

Spectacle PDF Author: Lauren Goodwin Slaughter
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0991640470
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Book Description
In Spectacle, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter's second full-length collection, the poet deepens her commitment to the enduring and eternal subjects of womanhood, motherhood, and family, and deftly considers how those devotions intersect in ways joyful, mysterious, and cruel within personal and political landscapes. Slaughter’s poems seek out and explore authentic, raw humanity, at times employing the gaze of Dutch photographer and artist, Rineke Dijkstra—several of whose photographic portraits are included in the collection alongside ekphrastic poems—as a lens to view what Dijkstra calls the "uninhibited moment.” When artistic eye meets the fierceness of subject, the result is poetry deeply rooted in its lyricism and empathy, grounded in its depth of emotion, and unflinching in its alertness to the poet's beloveds and world.

Dancing the Fault

Dancing the Fault PDF Author: Judith Minty
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description


The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf PDF Author: Mojha Kahf
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786735422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between "Muslim" and "American." When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state -- taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayiba's sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, she's back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brother's interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the "aunties" and "uncles," and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere. Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice.

In the Vortex of the Cyclone

In the Vortex of the Cyclone PDF Author: Excilia Saldaña
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813064291
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first-ever bilingual anthology by the Afro-Cuban poet Excilia Saldana contains a wide-ranging selection of her work, from lullabies to an erotic letter, from lengthy autobiographical poems to quiet reflections on her Caribbean island as the inspiration for her writing. Known in Cuba as a poet, essayist, translator, and professor, Saldana won the prestigious Nicholas Guillen Award for Distinction in Poetry in 1998 and the La Rosa Blanca Prize for La Noche, a children's book, in 1989. Before her death in 1999, most of her work had appeared in Spanish exclusively in Cuba with only scattered translations. This collection emphasizes her construction of a personal and poetic autobiography to reveal the identity of one of the best Afro-Caribbean poets of the twentieth century.