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G&S Typesetters PDF proof C H A P T E R T W O Feminism, Nationalism, and Colonialism in the Arab World Section I Plurality, multiplicity, and multiculturalism characterize our world today. Neo-colonialism is part of this reality, although it functions in complex ways. It has become more difficult simply to divide the world today into separate entities: colonial and colonized. It is not easy to decide who is colonized or liberated, nor to define the process by which domination takes place. Still, colonial discourse remains highly relevant when it comes to issues of marketing , editing, and reception of texts. These issues are considered in relation to every text I study. For example, in the case of the anthologies of interviews with women, in which the questions are determined by the editor, one can legitimately ask whether this is a colonial situation.1 However, colonial discourse can disempower the subject if one stays trapped in discourse in the Foucauldian sense. Writing is a means of empowerment. In this regard, I argue here that all the texts that I am studying are “writing back” texts, each in its particular way. By this I mean that these texts offer different discourses about Arab women’s lives than those already written about them by westerners and by Arab males. These texts might not be able to change the world individually. Collectively and together with other similar texts, however, they can contribute to changing the political climate. The Arab world has been undergoing constant, and sometimes radical, changes for the last 150 years. Change in the situation of Arab women and the way they perceive and identify themselves is reflected in the texts that I analyze in Part Three.2 In this chapter, I discuss the issues that have shaped the identities and lives of modern Arab women, notably feminism, nationalism, and colonialism. These three discourses have been argued to be interconnected in the Arab world, as in many other developing countries. As a case study for the theoretical issues raised, in Chapter 3 I examine Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist. 15 02-T2696 8/14/03 5:16 PM Page 15 G&S Typesetters PDF proof ORIENTALIST VIEWS AND COUNTER-DISCOURSE As in the case of many developing countries, the pace and extent of change in the Arab world grew with the intervention of western imperialism. National consciousness was a reaction to western colonialism, which started early in the eighteenth century. Since then, national liberation movements not only have changed the political map of the Arab world but have changed the socioeconomic structure of the whole region. It goes without saying that this change has also included the situation of Arab women.3 In the Arab world, feminist consciousness has developed hand in hand with national consciousness since the early nineteenth century.4 Some have even gone further to argue that because feminist and national consciousness emerged at the same time and as a reaction to western imperialism, feminism is an illegal immigrant and an alien import to the Arab world and, as such, is not relevant to the people and their culture. This has been mainly argued by Arab traditionalists and political conservatives and those who oppose the emancipation of women,5 who consider feminism irrelevant to Arab culture. As Kumari Jaywardena sums it up, they believe that feminism is a product of “decadent” Western capitalism . . . it is the ideology of women of the local bourgeoisie, and that it either alienates women from their culture, religion and family responsibilities on the one hand, or from the revolutionary struggle for national liberation and Socialism on the other.6 This kind of argumentation is only to be expected, but it is no ground for rejecting and opposing Arab feminism. I want to argue that the rise of the women’s movement in the Arab world has indeed been affected by women’s movements from other parts of the world, but that does not make it alien to Arab culture as such. Neither has Arab feminism had a positive reception in the west. The textured image of exoticism which has been woven in the west over the centuries still dominates the way in which the Arab world is perceived. Orientalist discourses have influenced the way that Arab feminism, in particular, has been received and understood in the west. According to such discourses, the movement for women’s liberation is, again, not indigenous to Arab countries . When such...

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