| North African women's writings project not compliance with contemporary Islamic and patriarchal regimes but reveal agency for Arab women in cultural and political systems. Moroccan professor Fatima Mernissi, Ph.D., writes autobiography, oral history in interviews, and Islamic political and sociological criticism to reflect Arab women's lives, their strength and power. As a modern Scheherazade, Mernissi addresses Western audiences to explain Arab women's plight under Islamic law, their abilities to enforce justice, and their capabilities of forward movement in a modern world. The writings of Edward Said, suggesting Arab women's literature for literary criticism, demonstrate that Moroccan women advance from intra-generational, colonial harem teachings to postcolonial voices of transformation.; Section One, Cultural Space, discusses postcolonial changes in Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass in which arguments for and against past and present cultural spaces define agency, as she points to Morocco's colonial-to-postcolonial transitions, indicating departures from past traditions and conversions into new nationalistic life styles. Like Mernissi's multiple texts, Monia Hejaiej's Behind Closed Doors exemplifies, through folkloric tales, immeasurable complications defying Western ethnographic and quantifiable standards. Guided by theorist George Rosenwald, analysis of Hejaiej's stories critiques Moroccan women's designated cultural spaces.; Section Two, Political Space, argues that Western criticism of Arab women as Other conflicts with postcolonial transitions into other. Mernissi's Doing Daily Battle exemplifies women's liberating political spaces in postcolonial Morocco. Through Western collective gazes, pictorial examples and Luce Irigaray's definition of Other, one sees how Arab women redefining "an/other" and identifying political space allows insights into a female gendered solidarity. Feminism's confining ideologies and subaltern concepts of Other complicate perceptions of Arab women's democratic voices. However, Clenora Hudson Weems' theory of Womanism offers alternative measures to critique North African women's literature. In postcolonial theory, Homi K. Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and differentness explain Moroccan women's realistic reshaping of political space.; This dissertation calls for alterations in Western feminist perceptions and ethnocentric standards for evaluating Arab women's literature. Postcolonial transitional processes for Arab women provide opportunities for their voices to be evaluated within their own cultural and political spaces. |
