Search results for ""Author Reina Lewis""

In the shops of London's Oxford Street, girls wear patterned scarves over their hair as they cluster around makeup counters. Alongside them, hip twenty-somethings style their head-wraps in high black topknots to match their black boot-cut trousers. Participating in the world of popular mainstream fashion—often thought to be the domain of the West—these young Muslim women are part of an emergent cross-faith transnational youth subculture of modest fashion. In treating hijab and other forms of modest clothing as fashion, Reina Lewis counters the overuse of images of veiled women as "evidence" in the prevalent suggestion that Muslims and Islam are incompatible with Western modernity. Muslim Fashion contextualizes modest wardrobe styling within Islamic and global consumer cultures, interviewing key players including designers, bloggers, shoppers, store clerks, and shop owners. Focusing on Britain, North America, and Turkey, Lewis provides insights into the ways young Muslim women use multiple fashion systems to negotiate religion, identity, and ethnicity.

Read more less

"Gender, Modernity and Liberty" presents a dialogue between Western and Middle Eastern women that is often presumed never to have happened. Not only were women from the Middle East imagined to be shut up in a harem all day without access to education, ideas or the outside world, but the extent to which Western women travellers were able to engage with women in the regions they visited has often been overlooked. This pioneering collection provides substantial extracts from Ottoman, Egyptian and British and American writers - each with a biographical and literary introduction - that trace the development of an intellectual, personal and critical dialogue between women over a period of accelerated social change marked by Arab nationalism and Egypt's move to independence, and the establishment of the Turkish Republic at the end of the Ottoman Empire. The ways in which the role of woman as either guardian of tradition or in the vanguard of change was hotly contested in both countries and by all sides of the political spectrum is explained in an editors' introduction and photo-essay that set up the common themes of the collection. "Gender, Modernity and Liberty" includes writings by Halide Edib, Musbah Haidar, Hoda Shaarawi, Emine Foat Tugay, Demetra Vaka Brown, Zeyneb Hanoum, Lady Annie Brassey, Grace Ellison, Annie Harvey, Emmeline Lott, Sophia Poole and Ruth Woodsmall. Participating in local and international debates, they wrote about the harem, polygyny, nationalism and modernism and commented on fashion alongside discussions about feminism and slavery, knowing all the while that their books were likely to be read through the exoticising frame of Western Orientalist stereotype. Their success in negotiating the very constraints that provided the - often prurient - market for their books, reveals a will to self-determination that speaks to the challenges still faced today by women from the Middle East and the Muslim world.

Read more less

The influential readings collected for this volume reflect not just the textual and discursive nature of colonial and postcolonial discourse in relation to gender, but also the material effects of the postcolonial condition and practices developed in relation to it. The volume seeks to open up the field by juxtaposing a number of contested subjects. Readings cover a range of geographical regions including: South-east Asia, India, Africa, Latin America, Canada, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Australia and Ireland. Key topics include: colonialism and anti-colonialism, 'otherness', sexuality, sexual rights, the harem and the veil, space and writing, and aboriginal and indigenous women's issues. Not only does this anthology address the lack of attention to gender and feminism in early studies of colonial discourse, it also provides resources for readers to trace the developments in feminism as it responds to postcolonial critiques of First World feminism.

Read more less

In the first book to address the critical role of the (un)dressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East, these essays unveil contemporary struggles over nation, gender, modernity and post-modernity. Contributions from leading interdisciplinary scholars, exploring gender representation, photography, dress and visual culture, recount the role of the visible elite body in campaigns for gender and social emancipation, dress histories concerning early nationalist women and men, and legal frameworks used by those who seek to control the movement of gendered bodies. The result is a rich picture of a historical period and cultural landscape which brings dress and visual culture back into historical narratives of the modern Middle East. Recognising multiple modernities, multiple imperialisms and diverse regional experiences of post-colonialism, Fashioning the Modern Middle East contains a range of theoretical frameworks invaluable to students of fashion studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, photography and gender. Bringing forward new primary material and re-investigating extant sources from new perspectives, this is the essential introduction to the role of the dressed and undressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East.

Read more less

This unique collection takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its center from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms. This new lens reveals the essential role of the Ottoman city and its patrons and artists in the dialogues that facilitated production, circulation, and consumption of British Orientalist cultures. In this volume, art works are conceptualized as traveling artifacts produced through localized interactions. World renowned scholars and curators analyze the diverse audiences for such art works and the range of differing contexts for their reception both in the 19th century and more recently. In this way, British art is put into a dynamic relationship with an historicized understanding of cultures of collecting and display during the formation of comparative modernities and also with the contemporary postcolonial creation of new national models of exhibition and education. Featuring stunning visuals, this book puts art history in the context of cultural, visual, and literary studies, challenging the orthodoxies of postcolonial theory with the materiality of multiple imperialisms and modernities to offer a new take on the collection, display, and consumption of Orientalist cultures.

Read more less

This dazzling exploration of contemporary Muslim modest dress, from historic styles to present-day examples, accompanies a major exhibition and reveals the enormous range of self-expression through fashion achieved by Muslim men and women. Filled with documentary and fashion photography as well as stills from runway shows and the media, this book explores the ways Muslim style cultures are shaped by global trends and religious beliefs. From high-end couture to street- wear, this volume shows how established and diaspora regions, such as Dubai, Jakarta, London, and New York, are homes to thriving industries that create classic and cutting-edge looks. Accompanying these images are essays and personal narratives by leading voices that touch on everything from the history of modest dress to social media. A fascinating examination of a major segment of the fashion industry, this book highlights the ingenuity and creativity of Muslim designers and wearers as they deftly navigate the fashion industry while maintaining their religious and cultural identities.

Read more less