Description
Book SynopsisFar from offering another study that bemoans Arab women's repression and veiling,
Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force.
Trade ReviewA groundbreaking monograph on Arab fiction by women, intertwining issues of gender, trauma, politics, and war.|Al-Samman examines the writing of six women from the past fifty years to discover the threads that draws their work into communication with one another.|Anxiety of Erasure is the kind of book we need today--both because we need more studies that focus on women's texts and struggles and also because these must be linked together in order to actualize the political possibilities.|
Anxiety of Erasure marks a step forward in feminist critique of Arab women’s writings. In juxtaposing the traumas of wa’d, or pre-Islamic female infanticide, with the Lebanese Civil War, al-Samman has linked Arab women’s erasure, and especially fear of literary erasure, across time. Her close readings of these novels and short stories are original and perceptive, suggesting a novel approach to Arab women writers and diaspora as a cosmopolitan site of literary production.|Al-Samman’s analysis is lucid and textually rich. . . . A vital contribution to the understudied field of Arab women’s narrative.|An eye-opening read that addresses the depths of the angst of the Arab woman. Al-Samman has used a wide range of literature from a number of authors and pieced them together to bring to light the misjudged chronicle of the Arab woman’s existence.|An important, alert voice of literary criticism on Arab women’s writing, with a scope that encompasses pre-modern not just contemporary work, and pays attention to roots and literary genealogy, giving it a depth that many who look only at modern Arab women’s writing don’t have, and her work matters to me, and to the research of my students.|A vital edition to the understudies field of Arab women's writing.|"An important reading of contemporary Arab women writers in the diaspora, including Europe and the Americas, over the past half-century, contributing to the fields of Arabic literature, gender studies, and diaspora studies.
