Male domination, female revolt: race, class and gender in Kuwaiti women's fiction

This thesis investigates various forms of women's resistance to male domination in Kuwaiti society, as represented in Kuwaiti women's fiction. Two short stories: Hayfa' Hashim's "al-Intiqam al-rahtb" (1953) and Layla al-'Uthman's "Min milaff imra'a" (1979), and three novels: al-'Uthman's Wasmiyya takhruj min al-bahr (1986), Tayyiba al-Ibrahlm's Mudhakkirat khadim (1995), and Fawziyya S. al-Salim's Muzun (2000) are closely analysed, drawing from Marxist-feminist literary criticism. I argue that these texts portray their respective heroines, representing the pre-oil generations of Kuwaiti women - born before or in the first half of the twentieth century - as resistant and/or revolutionary figures, contrary to the common notion of their stereotypical passivity and submissiveness. In view of the fact that these texts, as well as some others that are not represented here, form a minority among Kuwaiti women's fiction, they are here considered as 'feminist revolutionary' texts.Part One introduces Kuwait and its people, with special reference to the development of Kuwaiti fiction (Chapter One), and the Kuwaiti female literary tradition (Chapter Two). Part Two (Chapters Three through Six) demonstrates how the Kuwaiti patriarchal tradition has affected, and continues to affect, race, class and gender relations in Kuwait, in a way that is discriminatory against and oppressive to women. An example of this is found in the sex-related concept of sharaf or fadiha (social honour or dishonour) - a-common-denominator ideology which each of the texts seeks to reflect and deconstruct. Exploring the agency which each of the authors has constructed for her heroine's defiance, evasion, or subversion of patriarchal authority, this study asserts that some pre-oil Kuwaiti women have been actively resistant to male domination, and that they have worked for social change

Contemporary Emirati Literature: Its Historical Development and Forms

This article provides a general survey of Emirati literature—poetry, drama, the short story and novel—tracing the history of the development of these genres in the periods before and after the formation of the UAE federation in 1971. While the UAE has now become famous as the commercial and tourist hub of the contemporary Middle East, very little is known in the English speaking world about the country’s literary and cultural productions within the context of the wider modern Arabic literary tradition. The article constitutes a preliminary report of an on-going project on the topic in which I am arguing that, contrary to the general perception in academia (East and West), contemporary Emirati literature is not inferior to its counterparts in the Gulf and wider Arab region; and that Emirati women are as active as their male compatriots in literary production.Key words: Arabic, literature, Emirati, contemporary, history, criticis