Explores the contested role of ‘veiling’ over last 150 years, seen both in terms of oppression and resistance in literature.

This groundbreaking book analyzes a wide range of literary and visual texts, many of which have not received treatment elsewhere, and promotes an emergent canon of women's writing and film.

Drawing upon law, politics, sociology, and gender studies, this volume explores the ways in which the Muslim body is stereotyped, interrogated, appropriated and demonized in Western societies and subject to counter-terror legislation and the suspension of human rights. The author examines the intense scrutiny of Muslim women’s dress and appearance, and their experience of hate crimes, as well as how Muslim men’s bodies are emasculated, effeminized and subjected to torture. Chapters explore a range of issues including Western legislation and foreign policy against the ‘Other’, orientalism, Islamophobia, masculinity, the intersection of gender with nationalism and questions about diversity, inclusion, religious freedom, citizenship and identity. This text will be of interest to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, gender studies, law, politics, cultural studies, international relations, and human rights.

The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Fourth International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Lincoln, May 28–30, 2011. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessors in 2005, 2007 and 2009, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen thirty volumes in print, with another twelve in press or in the process of being written. The 2011 conference and the book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness. Fifty-five delegates from twenty-eight countries across the world attended the May 2011 conference in Lincoln; their range of disciplines and approaches is reflected well in this book.

This book is the first book-length study to explore the sartorial politics of identity in the literature of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Using fashion and dress as the main focus of analysis, and linking them with a myriad of identity concerns, the book takes the reader on a journey from the eighteenth century to the new millennium, from early travel account by South Asian writers to contemporary British-Asian fictions. Besides sartorial readings of other key authors and texts, the book provides an in-depth exploration of Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).This work examines what an analysis of dress contributes to the interpretation of the featured texts, their contexts and identity politics, but it also considers what literature has added to past and present discussions on the South Asian dressed body in Br itain. Endowed with an interdisciplinary emphasis, the book is of interest to students and academics in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, socio-cultural studies and fashion theory.

The present volume contains general essays on: unequal African/Western academic exchange; the state and structure of postcolonial studies; representing male violence in Zimbabwe’s wars; parihaka in the poetic imagination of Aotearoa New Zealand; Middle Eastern, Nigerian, Moroccan, and diasporic Indian women’s writing; community in post-Independence Maltese poetry in English; key novels of the Portuguese colonies; the TV series The Kumars at No. 42; fictional representations of India; the North in western Canadian writing; and a pedagogy of African-Canadian literature. As well as these, there is a selection of poems from Malta by Daniel Massa, Adrian Grima, Norbert Bugeja, Immanuel Mifsud, and Maria Grech Ganado, and essays providing close readings of works by the following authors and filmmakers: Thea Astley, George Elliott Clarke, Alan Duff, Francis Ebejer, Lorena Gale, Romesh Gunesekera, Sahar Khalīfah, Anthony Minghella, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe, Salman Rushdie, Ghādah al-Sammān, Meera Syal, Lee Tamahori. Contributors: Leila Abouzeid, Hoda Barakat, Amrit Biswas, Thomas Bonnici, Stella Borg Barthet, Ivan Callus, Devon Campbell–Hall, Saviour Catania, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Crow, Pilar Cuder–Domínguez, Bärbel Czennia, Hilary P. Dannenberg, Pauline Dodgson–Katiyo, Bernadette Falzon, Daphne Grace, Adrian Grima, Kifah Hanna, Janne Korkka, T. Vijay Kumar, Chantal Kwast–Greff, Maureen Lynch Pèrcopo, Kevin Stephen Magri, Isabel Moutinho, Melanie A. Murray, Taiwo Oloruntoba–Oju, Gerhard Stilz, Jesús Varela Zapata, Christine Vogt–William.

The purpose of this volume is twofold: to introduce readers to the study of cultural memory and identity in relation to the Hebrew Bible, and to set up strategies for connecting studies of the historical contexts and literature of the Bible to parallel issues in the present day. The volume questions how we can better understand the divide between insider and outsider and the powerful impact of prejudice as a basis for preserving differences between "us" and "them"? In turn the contributors question how such frameworks shape a community's self-perception, its economics and politics. Guided by the general framework of Anderson's theory of nationalism and the outsider, such issues are explored in related ways throughout each of the contributions. Each contribution focuses on social, economic, or political issues that have significantly shaped or influenced dominant elements of cultural memory and the construction of identity in the biblical texts. Together the contributions present a larger proposal: the broad contours of memory and identity in the Bible are the products of a collective desire to reshape the social-political world.

This is an in-depth, original survey of religion in the modern Arabic novel. Tracing the relationship from the genesis of the form in the early 20th century to present, Phillips provides a thematic exploration of the push and pull between religion and secularism as it played out on the pages of the Egyptian novel. Through close readings of representative texts, the book reveals the manifold ways in which Islam, Christianity, Sufism, myth, ritual and intertext have engaged in modern Arabic literature and culture more broadly.

The multicultural world of today is often said to be marked by a certain kind of exoticization: a “fetishizing process”, as Graham Huggan has called it, which separates a “first world” from a “third world”, the Occident from the Orient. The essays collected here re-assess this tendency, not least by focusing on the kinds of intellectual tourism and dilettantism to which it has given rise. The wider context of these analyses is a postcolonial scenario where literatures and languages can move from the “exotic” to the comparatively “familiar” space of contemporary writings; where an exotic mythos can live on into the familiar present; and where certain perceptions and representations of peoples, of literatures, and of languages have turned exoticization and familiarization into global modes of mass-cultural consumption. Especially by exploring the liminalities between different cultures, this collection manages to trace both the history and the politics of exoticist representation and, in so doing, to make a significant critical intervention.

A nuanced understanding of literary imaginings of masculinity and femininity in the context of the 'national' canon of Egypt.