Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
EDITORIAL
cAtkinson
LisaTaylor
40Taylor
18
lisataylorbishopsu@gmail.comltaylor@ubishops.ca
000002007
&
Intercultural
10.1080/14675980701605139
CEJI_A_260365.sgm
1467-5986
2007
Editorial
andFrancis
(print)/1469-8439
Francis
Education
(online)
This special issue of Intercultural Education traces its origins to a conference panel
examining the reception and teaching of Azar Nafisis 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in
Tehran. In mid-2004 when the panel was conceived, Nafisis text was the most
popular among an explosion of memoirs, novels, nonfiction and childrens literature
by and about Muslim and Arab women being enthusiastically marketed and
consumed in North America. The papers on this panel focused on how Nafisis text
was being taken up within an Islamophobic global context in which Muslim women
were increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination produced
through a complex nexus of societal and imperial aggression. Now in 2007, the
surge of writing and cultural production by and about Muslim and Arab women
continuestexts which both challenge and perpetuate the currency of Orientalist
writing and representation. Within the context of the current global and geo-political
landscape and the war on terror, competing imaginariesWestern imperialist,
Orientalist, imperialist feminist as well as transnational feminist, anti-colonial and
Islamicform a contested terrain of knowledge production upon which the lives,
histories and subjectivities of Muslim women are discursively constituted, debated,
claimed and consumed through a variety of literary, academic and visual forms of
representation.
This special issue seeks to critically examine the ways these forms of representation are taken up in various educational sites and also to interrogate and reflect on
*Corresponding author. Department of Sociology, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University
Avenue, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3C5, Canada. Email: jzine@wlu.ca
ISSN 1467-5986 (print)/ISSN 1469-8439 (online)/07/04027110
2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14675980701605139
Transnational feminists such as Mohanty (1991), Amos and Parmar (1984), Lazreg
(1988) have critiqued imperialist feminism for its representation of subaltern
Muslim women through the binary relations of the North/South balance of power
and the corresponding construction of Muslim and Third World women as an
abject, essentialized category of other. Such representation plays into the
Manichean racial and religious divide underscoring the clash of civilizations thesis
and holds Muslim womens lives and experiences in a seemingly irreconcilable
tension with dominant Western sensibilities and democratic imperatives. Texts like
Geraldine Brooks (1994), Nine parts of desire or Jan Godwins (1995), Price of honour
provided the Western reader with authentic glimpses into the mysterious world of
the subaltern Muslim woman residing in exotic locales leading imperilled lives in
which they lack agency and voice, and require their First World sisters to become
their intellectual vanguards and political advocates. In response, trans-national
feminist discourses have centered their politics of representation on exposing the
North/South imbalance of power that has allowed feminist scholars of the North
greater access to laying claim to discursive authority over women in the South as the
objects of academic enquiry, or through more paternal and politicized tropes of
rescuing the Other.
Editorial
273
Texts such as Nafisis must be read against the imperial politics that galvanize their
popularity as authorizing texts of Muslim womens imperiled lives.
Editorial
275
The post-9/11 years have also witnessed a surge of resistant and reconstructive
writing by Muslim authors, artists and scholars, one which builds upon a long
history of anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal cultural politics/expression. For example, Lila Azam Zanganehs anthology, My sister guard your veil; my brother guard your
eyes: uncensored Iranian voices (2006) and Keshavarz autobiographical Jasmine and
stars: reading more than Lolita in Tehran (2007), intervene directly in the marketing
and reception of Nafisis memoir, providing the cultural, political and historical
context suspiciously excluded in the latter. Significantly, Keshavarz book jacket
presents two brightly and casually veiled fashionable Tehrani demonstrators and
translates the feminist demands on their placards. This publishing decision responds
directly to the iconic burglary of Nafisis bookjacket, in which a photo of Tehrani
college students reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat in front of a
poster of the reformist politician, Mohammad Khatami, has been cropped down to
the isolated, stereotyped image of two womens bowed, darkly veiled heads
(Dabashi, 2006). Likewise, in this special issue, Lindsey Moore juxtaposes counterrepresentations to the photographic imaginary harem (Alloula cited in Moore,
2007) and visual discursive economies of French colonization of Algeria mounted by
Malek Alloula, Frantz Fanon and contemporary novelist/filmmaker Assia Djebar
and artist Zineb Sedira. Moore examines the Algerian woman, as a contested and
mobile signifier, read as produced by, but always in excess of, historically-specific
discourses and differently-embodied reading/spectating positions (Moore, 2007).
Her unpacking of the Muslim woman as a semiotic subject, provides a politically
subversive hermeneutics.
Anti-Orientalist resistance is not only deconstructivecritiquing Imperialist
stereotypes and assumptions about Western superioritybut also constructive in
offering alternative contemporary and traditional representations of Muslim
women which resist easy identifications and pat understandings of Islam. Most
importantly, the audiences of these new cultural and scholarly productions are not
monolithic but rather multiple and overlapping, dynamic and often emergent. For
example, author Mohja Kahf (interviewed in this issue) describes her audiences as
diverse and intersectingnot only Muslim, Arab, faith-based, and academicbut
also (in her words), Boomer leftists, conservative young Christians. Afro-centric
African Americans. White suburbanites. Urban people of color with scathing
critiques of mainstream white America. Grandmothers next door, students who
graduate and write me (Davis et al., 2007). Similarly, in Little mosque on the prairie,
Canadian filmmaker Zarqa Nawaz (interviewed in this issue) subverts both
Orientalist expectations and the television comedy format to offer complex and
contemporary interpretations of what are usually stock characters and situations
while stimulating debate within a diaspora of faith-based communities of viewers.
And Mona Hatoum (discussed in Khan in this issue), a Palestinian-Lebanese-British
performance, video, and installation artist uses text, taped conversation, photography, and voice-over narration which juxtaposes Arabic and English to explore the
trauma of war and exile and new affiliations/identities these engender. Recent
anthologies, like Sarah Husains Voices of resistance: Muslim women on war, faith and
Editorial
277
this governments ongoing refusal, alone in the industrialized world, to ratify the
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Eisenstein,
2006).
Spivaks ethics of reading encourages a suspicion of those identity categories
mobilized in the act of reading, speaking and acting as, about, for and against and
instead challenges differently positioned readers to earn the right to criticize
(Spivak, 1990, p. 62) by doing the homework required to historically contextualize
texts and readers, and thus to learn to read and act in relation to. This pedagogical
attention to how we read, speak and act in relation to is crucial to visual artist Jamelie
Hassan (interviewed in this issue), for example, as her activist interventions into
public spaces grow out of relations of solidarity and collaboration with First Nations
and other anti-colonial and antiwar struggles.
Mehre Khan, Alnaaz Kassam, zlem Sensoy, Asma Barlas and Lisa K. Taylors
pieces propose pedagogical strategies in different settings which ground a practice of
reading in relation to differently positioned authors, characters and audiences, and
reading in relation to differently imagined epistemologies, collectivities, affiliations,
historical memories and desired futures.
All five educators address the politics of representation centrally in their pedagogy
as they foreground in their practice the tensions inherent to the complex subject
locations from which they teach and read. Sensoy teaches explicitly from the
complexity of her subject location as a white Turkish immigrant academic in urging
her teacher candidates to situate and redefine the locations from which they
construct racialized relations of ethnicity, faith, citizenship and East/West. Kassam
challenges Eurocentric canons and dominant secondary school literature curriculum, selecting texts and creating a classroom environment of critical anti-racist literacy and dialogue within which her students are encouraged to read as dynamic
subjects complexly located within intersecting relations of historical memory,
spiritual affiliation, global citizenship, cultural consumption and geographies of
migration and assimilation.
Khan argues that Hatoums post-colonial autobiographical video art uniquely
facilitates her undergraduate students development of a critically reflexive visual
literacy in relation to the Western memory museum of (neo)Orientalist visual economies (Sontag in Khan, 2007): it does so by utilizing the personal and familiar to
demystify notions of the foreign and troubling the seeming transparency of experiential and televisual knowledge. In challenging students to examine [their] own
relationship to dominant modes of visual communication, colonialist histories,
gendered and racialized political economies, she maintains that such interactive art
establishes alternative spectatorships which reflexively read in relation to insurgent
and diasporic identities mobiliz[ing] desire, memory, and fantasy where identities
are not only the given of where one comes from but also the political identification
with where one is trying to go (Shohat in Khan, 2007).
Spivaks challenge for educators and students to historicize critically the geopolitical locations from which they read, speak and make knowledge claims incites an
array of refusals and negotiations explored by Barlas whose students struggle to
Editorial
279
Notes on contributors
Jasmin Zine (PhD OISE/UT, University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Sociology at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.
She teaches in the area of critical race and ethnic studies and education and
social justice. Her research and publications have focused on anti-racism education and inclusive schooling, as well as Muslims and education in the Canadian
diaspora. In the area of Muslim womens studies, she has published articles on
Islamic feminism in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and the Muslim
World Journal of Human Rights.
Lisa K. Taylor (PhD OISE/UT, University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor at
Bishops University in Quebec, Canada. She teaches in the area of social justice
education, critical race and ethnic studies in education and literature education.
Her research and publications have focused on social justice teacher education,
critical multicultural, multilingual and multiliteracies curriculum, with a
particular focus on postcolonial feminist perspectives on language and literacy
education (in TESOL Quarterly and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies).
Hilary E. Davis (PhD OISE/UT, University of Toronto) currently teaches in the
School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson College, York University, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada and has also taught in the Philosophy Department at York
University and the Philosophy of Education Program at OISE/UT. Her areas of
research combine feminist aesthetics, critical approaches to multicultural literature education, and continental philosophy. She has published on feminist and
anti-racist approaches to an aesthetics of reading in Educational Theory, New
Literary History, and The Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society.
References
Ali, A. H. (2007) Infidel (New York, Free Press).
Amireh, A. & Majaj, L. S. (Eds) (2000) Going global: the transnational reception of third world women
writers (New York and London, Garland Publishing).
Amos, V. & Parmar, P. (1984) Challenging imperial feminism, Feminist Review, No. 17, July,
319,
Barlas, A. (2007) Teaching about Islam and women: on pedagogy and the personal, Intercultural
Education, 18(4), 367371.
Brooks, G. (1995) Nine parts of desire (New York, Anchor Books).
Burwell, C. (2007) Reading Lolita in times of war: womens book clubs and the politics of
reception, Intercultural Education, 18(4), 281296.
Dabashi, H. (2006) Native informers and the making of the American empire, Al-Ahram Weekly
Online, 797. Available online at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm (accessed 7
August 2007).
Davis, Hilary, E. Zine, J. & Taylor, L. K. (2007) Interview with Mohja Kahf, Intercultural Education, 18(4), 383388.
Eisenstein, Z. (2006) Is W for women?, in: K. Hunt & K. Rygiel (Eds) (En)gendering the war on
terror: war stories and camouflaged politics (UK, Ashgate Publishing), 191200.
Goodwin, J. (1995) Price of honor: Muslim women lift the veil of silence on the Islamic world (New
York, Penguin Books).