Author: Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433107122
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
Haram in the Harem focuses on the differences in nationalist discourse regarding women and the way female writers conceptualized the experience of women in three contexts: the middle-class Muslim reform movement, the Algerian Revolution, and the Partition of India. During each of these periods the subject of women, their behavior, bodies, and dress were discussed by male scholars, politicians, and revolutionaries. The resonating theme amongst these disparate events is that women were believed to be best protected when they were ensconced within their homes and governed by their families, particularly male authority, whether they were fathers, brothers, or husbands. The threat to national identity was often linked to the preservation of womanly purity. Yet for the writers of this study, Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991), Assia Djebar (1936-), and Khadija Mastur (1927-1982), the danger to women was not in the public sphere but embedded within a domestic hierarchy enforced by male privilege. In their fictional texts, each writer shows how women resist, subvert, and challenge the normative behaviors prescribed in masculine discourse. In their writings they highlight the different ways women negotiated private spaces between intersecting masculine hegemonies of power including colonialism and native patriarchy. They demonstrate distinct literary viewpoints of nation, home, and women's experiences at particular historical moments. The choice of these various texts reveals how fiction provided a safe space for female writers to contest traditional systems of power. Bringing into focus the voices and experiences of women - who existed as limited cultural icons in the nationalist discourse - is a common theme throughout the selected stories. This book showcases the fluidity of literature as a response to the intersections of gender, race, and nation.
Author: Jillian Lauren
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452296315
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince's harem, and emerges from the secret Xanadu both richer and wiser At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The "casting director" told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next eighteen months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, leaving behind her gritty East Village apartment for a palace with rugs laced with gold and trading her band of artist friends for a coterie of backstabbing beauties. More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, Some Girls is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself-and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.
Author: Annick Cojean
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802121721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Follows a fifteen-year-old girl who, after presenting Gaddafi with a bouquet of flowers during a visit to her school, was summoned to his compound where she, along with a number of young women, was violently abused, raped, and degraded.
Author: Roberta Rich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145165748X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Not since Anna Diamant’s The Red Tent or Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book has a novel transported readers so intimately into the complex lives of women centuries ago or so richly into a story of intrigue that transcends the boundaries of history. A “lavishly detailed” (Elle Canada) debut that masterfully captures sixteenth-century Venice against a dramatic and poetic tale of suspense. Hannah Levi is renowned throughout Venice for her gift at coaxing reluctant babies from their mothers using her secret “birthing spoons.” When a count implores her to attend his dying wife and save their unborn son, she is torn. A Papal edict forbids Jews from rendering medical treatment to Christians, but his payment is enough to ransom her husband Isaac, who has been captured at sea. Can she refuse her duty to a woman who is suffering? Hannah’s choice entangles her in a treacherous family rivalry that endangers the child and threatens her voyage to Malta, where Isaac, believing her dead in the plague, is preparing to buy his passage to a new life. Told with exceptional skill, The Midwife of Venice brings to life a time and a place cloaked in fascination and mystery and introduces a captivating new talent in historical fiction.
Author: Mehdi Charef
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
The lives of second-generation Algerians in a Paris housing project, the basis of the award-winning film.¶"Writing that is both dazzling and economical and a moral and aesthetic elegance that does not judge. The greatest attribute of this extraordinary first novel is its thirst for life."--Le Quotidien de Paris
Author: Fatima Mernissi
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780201489378
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
This "wonderful and enchanting" memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl's life in her family's French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review). "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth -- women who, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.
Author: Leslie Peirce
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.
Author: Kishori Saran Lal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
This work is a maiden attempt at research in the hitherto overlooked area of social history of medieval India.It attempts to recapitulate the day-to-day life of the ladies of the seraglio.The delicate and delightful task has been deftly handled and it is hoped that scholars and laymen both will enjoy.
Author: Nancy Hartwell Enonchong
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
ISBN: 1631351850
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
"Inspired by actual events . . . inspiring and enlightening!" - Ann B. "A heart-wrenching but inspiring tale of courage, resilience, and human survival. Beautifully written." - Jane R. "A must read! Tammy refuses to surrender and no matter what they do to her, her spirit is not broken." - Rachel M. "The suspense is intense. A sad story, but extremely well written." - Marie C. "This book really took me by surprise. It's fundamentally a horror story, a fascinating psychological study of what slavery does to the victim—and to her owners. An unflinching look at human trafficking carried out with finesse and grace." - Kristin W. "I stayed up reading this book until five a.m., then called in sick so I could finish it. I simply could not put it down. Best book by far I have ever read." - Chad K. "A fantastic book on a terrifying topic. I just wanted to curl up somewhere and keep reading. Fell in love with the gutsy heroine." - Doug H. "I didn't want to put this book down even long enough to eat. A revealing and restrained treatment of an explosive topic. Riveting!" - John H. "This book made me cry and shook me to the core. I was moved beyond words." - Leigh "I simply could not put this book down and polished it off in one day. The heroine's amazing strength of character and good heart shine through on every page." - Cathy D.
Author: Sattareh Farman Farmaian
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307339742
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
An intimate and honest chronicle of the everyday life of Iranian women over the past century “A lesson about the value of personal freedom and what happens to a nation when its people are denied the right to direct their own destiny. This is a book Americans should read.” —Washington Post The fifteenth of thirty-six children, Sattareh Farman Farmaian was born in Iran in 1921 to a wealthy and powerful shazdeh, or prince, and spent a happy childhood in her father’s Tehran harem. Inspired and empowered by his ardent belief in education, she defied tradition by traveling alone at the age of twenty-three to the United States to study at the University of Southern California. Ten years later, she returned to Tehran and founded the first school of social work in Iran. Intertwined with Sattareh’s personal story is her unique perspective on the Iranian political and social upheaval that have rocked Iran throughout the twentieth century, from the 1953 American-backed coup that toppled democratic premier Mossadegh to the brutal regime of the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini’s fanatic and anti-Western Islamic Republic. In 1979, after two decades of tirelessly serving Iran’s neediest, Sattareh was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and branded an imperialist by Ayatollah Khomeini’s radical students. Daughter of Persia is the remarkable story of a woman and a nation in the grip of profound change.
