Machine summary:
Taylor and Jasmin Zine, and based on the legacy of post-colonial writers like Gayatri Spivak and Paulo Friere, this collection foregrounds how Orientalism operates on the ground and discusses how we can come up with new discursive tools and spaces for articulations of difference and diversity and for “reading back” to resist the Empire.
The articles take up different stories to expose how racist, patriarchal, imperialist, and neo-Orientalist legacies cooperate with western feminism in the public and cultural realms and determine the forms of representation and modalities of agency that Muslim and Arab women can claim.
By discussing how patriarchal Orientalist discourses are politically coopted in western feminism and traveled from colonial Algeria to France and the post-1980 revolution, she demonstrates the necessity of a transnational anticolonial feminist pedagogy.
In “Of Activist Fandoms, Auteur, Pedagogy, and Imperial Feminism: From Buffy the Vampire Slayerto I am Du’a Khalil,” Salah establishes an unlikely connection between the brutal public stoning to death of Du’a Khalil, a Yazidi Iraqi woman, in 2007 and the fans of an American TV series in order to demonstrate the neo-Orien talist and imperialist underpinnings of “global sisterhood” and transnational feminist discourses.
Examining the young adult novel series of Shabanu by Suzanne Fisher Staples, Zine demon strates how neo-Orientalist discourses construct “pedagogies of peril,” that render Muslim and brown women intelligible to the western reader through the archetypes and racist logic of western imperialism.
Interviews with various Canada- and United States based female Muslim and Arab artists present unique examples to the anti racist and feminist pedagogical principles that have guided the articles.