EUME
2018/ 2019

Mona Kareem

Good Mothers, Bad Sisters: Arab Women in the Nation

Mona Kareem earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from The State University of New York at Binghamton (2018), with a dissertation entitled “Good Mothers, Bad Sisters: Arab Women Writers in the Nation.” She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from SUNY Binghamton and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the American University of Kuwait. For the past six years, Kareem has taught literature and writing classes at SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers University, and the City University of New York. She is the author of three poetry collections and two book-length translations. Her translation of Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award 2017. She has been a fellow at the BANFF center in Canada and the Norwich Center in the UK. Her research interests include the contemporary feminist novel, the Arabic prose poem, strategies of literary translation, and subaltern subjectivities. During the academic year of 2018/2019, Kareem will be a EUME Fellow associated with Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.


 

Good Mothers, Bad Sisters: Arab Women Writers in the Nation

This study will examine contemporary Arabic feminist writings that offer various perspectives on the nation vis-à-vis their fictional narratives on marginalized groups. The research is broken down into a number of key political questions: How do these women-writers tackle the experiences and histories of marginalized groups, specifically migrants, blacks, and the stateless? How do they challenge or reproduce hegemonic accounts, rhetoric, and representations in their approaches to subaltern subjectivities? How do their writings address the archaic question of politics and aesthetics? What kind of intellectual history is summoned and generated in their praxis of writing? The choice to focus on the contemporary Arab feminist novel has multiple reasons and functions. One, it is instigated by the rise of the genre. Two, the dominant mobilization of the feminist novel as a vehicle for sociopolitical critique calls for a sociopolitical reading. Three, it allows for a critique of the Arab feminist thought, to examine their feminist praxis in writing literature, and to subsequently debunk the hegemonic understanding of Arab women as one entity, centered around the experiences of middle-class citizen-women.