AFST 430 - N.AfricanWomens Fiction & Film

Credits: 4

Course required for the Africana Major/Minor: Women in North Africa have struggled for rights and recognition of their role as full members of society from colonial times to post-colonial present states. Though not encouraged, and sometimes denied, education has allowed the women who got it to speak loudly and denounce wrongs suffered by women in the name of tradition and the religion of Islam through skewed readings and interpretations by the male dominated society. Modern North African women writers and film directors tackle several themes hitherto taboo in Arabic-Islamic societies and question tradition as maintained in those societies to serve the male elite as Fatema Mernissi calls it. The themes of recovery of identity, re-description of stereotypes about women and resistance to colonialism and occupation, including the occupation of the women’s bodies, even rights within the religion are unveiled and questioned. These questions are springboards to criteria that may be used to examine representative North African (Maghrebi) women artistic, literary and film production. We will examine how relations of the women with the self and the other are expressed those texts in the light of the contemporaneity and as vehicles of the ever changing culture of that area being affected by the rampant globalism. Restriction: Junior or Senior Standing. Offered regularly.