HMCL 499A Senior Seminar: Asian and Arab Women in Literature: Voice of Change (Sokolsky)
During the era of Western imperialism, spaces occupied by non-white Europeans were
viewed in a variety of ways: dark, exotic, erotic, savage, and uneducated. The people
of these supposedly exotic lands were observed, explored, and exploited by Western
imperialists. Rarely were these people given a voice of their own, and rarely were they
viewed as autonomous humans on par with the "civilized" Western world. For women
in these countries, they had to endure a double-negative of silencing because they were
second-class citizens in the patriarchal societies in which they lived and they were also
exoticized and orientalized by the Western white men who decided to see in them the
fantasies they could not find in the women of their home countries. The goal of this
course is to explore these stereotypes. Why have they been created? Why do they still
persist? And what are women from the "Orient" tuly like? We will read texts by and
about Asian and Arab women to see how women have resisted these stereotypes of exoticism and how they have articulated their own and diverse voice. Texts will include
Sheridan Prasso's The Asian Mystique, Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (USA),
The Kagero Diary (Japan), The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong (Korea), Pearl Buck's The
Good Earth (China), Xiao Hong's Field of Life and Death (China), Hanan Al-Shaykh's
the Story of Zahra (Lebanon), and the feminist writings of Fatima Mernissi (Morocco). |
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