This essential collection examines South and Southeast Asian Muslim women's writing and the ways they navigate cultural, political, and controversial boundaries. Providing a global, contemporary collection of essays, this volume uses varied methods of analysis and methodology, including: * Contemporary forms of expression, such as memoir, oral accounts, romance novels, poetry, and social media; * Inclusion of both recognized and lesser-known Muslim authors; * Division by theme to shed light on geographical and transnational concerns; and * Regional focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Muslim Women's Writing from across South and Southeast Asia will deliver crucial scholarship for all readers interested in the varied perspectives and comparisons of Southern Asian writing, enabling both students and scholars alike to become better acquainted with the burgeoning field of Muslim women's writing. This timely and challenging volume aims to give voice to the creative women who are frequently overlooked and unheard.

Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899-1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923-1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

This essential collection examines South and Southeast Asian Muslim women's writing and the ways they navigate cultural, political, and controversial boundaries. Providing a global, contemporary collection of essays, this volume uses varied methods of analysis and methodology, including: * Contemporary forms of expression, such as memoir, oral accounts, romance novels, poetry, and social media; * Inclusion of both recognized and lesser-known Muslim authors; * Division by theme to shed light on geographical and transnational concerns; and * Regional focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Muslim Women's Writing from across South and Southeast Asia will deliver crucial scholarship for all readers interested in the varied perspectives and comparisons of Southern Asian writing, enabling both students and scholars alike to become better acquainted with the burgeoning field of Muslim women's writing. This timely and challenging volume aims to give voice to the creative women who are frequently overlooked and unheard.

Muslim women have been stereotyped by Western academia as oppressed and voiceless. This volume problematizes this Western academic representation. Muslim Women Writers from the Middle East from Out al-Kouloub al-Dimerdashiyyah (1899-1968) and Latifa al-Zayat (1923-1996) from Egypt, to current diasporic writers such as Tamara Chalabi from Iraq, Mohja Kahf from Syria, and even trendy writers such as Alexandra Chreiteh, challenge the received notion of Middle Eastern women as subjugated and secluded. The younger largely Muslim women scholars collected in this book present cutting edge theoretical perspectives on these Muslim women writers. This book includes essays from the conflict-ridden countries such as Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and the resultant diaspora. The strengths of Muslim women writers are captured by the scholars included herein. The approach is feminist, post-colonial, and disruptive of Western stereotypical academic tropes.

This volume was conceived as a space to provide visibility for South Asian women writers whose work has not had much exposure in the West. It contributes to the knowledge of South Asian women writers by including scholarship not only on little-known writers but also by scholars from India - in particular, those whose voices do not necessarily find themselves in western academic publications. Many South Asian women writers engage with the overall quest for survival, which can be affiliated with all the themes expressed in this volume: trauma, diaspora, injustice, resistance, place, space, language, and identity. The texts discussed herein contribute to the ongoing discourse related to such themes in postcolonial studies and transnational literature, and could be used in courses on South Asian literature, women's writing, postcolonial studies and literature, and world or transnational literature.

Intense, controversial, unfailingly clever, V. S. Naipaul has won nearly every major British writing award, including the prestigious Booker Award (in 1971 for "In a Free State") and in 1990 was knighted for his literary accomplishments. Born of Indian parents in Trinidad in 1932, he has little sympathy for the land of his birth or forefathers. All that he puts under his microscope--nations, peoples, religions, or ethnic groups--are targets of his clear-sightedness, and he shows no patience with pretense or delusions.

This collection brings together interviews from a thirty-six-year span and reveals a witty, sometimes scathing talker with a free-ranging curiosity, but one who dreads intimacy and cherishes a solitary detachment. This collection shows the changing faces of this world-class author. In early interviews, mostly given to such fellow writers and colleagues as Derek Walcott and the poet Eric Roach, Naipaul is clipped, brusque, and clearly impatient with interviewers. More recent interviews, given primarily to journalists rather than literary figures, reveal a maturing Naipaul, often warm, passionate, and forthcoming about his private life.