Cover image for Strange/rs together :  Arab women art, displacement, and narrative.
Strange/rs together : Arab women art, displacement, and narrative.
Title:
Strange/rs together : Arab women art, displacement, and narrative.
Author:
Abu Bakr, Sarah W.
ISBN:
9780438134331
Personal Author:
Publication Information:
Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018
Physical Description:
1 online resource (164 p.)
General Note:
Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 80-01, Section: A.
Publisher info.: Dissertation/Thesis.
Abstract:
In this dissertation, I examine meanings of displacement through a process of recollecting and re-narrating stories of Arab women, as well as examining the artwork of displaced Arab women artists. Displacement is regarded in both embodied and theoretical ways. I theorize the state of being displaced through art made by Arab women artists who have in different ways been displaced themselves. The Arab women discussed in this dissertation are Mona Hatoum, Ghada Amer, Ghadah Alkandari, Bahia Shehab, and Hanaa Malallah. The dissertation uses creative writing and multiple voices as a methodology of understanding the experiences of Arab women. I use writing as a way of knowing, and a way of constructing an alternative narrative about Arab women that goes beyond the reduction committed by global media stereotypes. I also use the art encounter (or lack of) as a way of knowing, and discuss limits of access that Arab bodies need to negotiate in our current historical moment, where Arab refugee bodies in specific are causing a global crisis. My dissertation aims to shift the knowledge produced about Arab women from its historically Orientalist discourse towards an open-ended inquiry that regards situated knowledge and personal experience as its epistemic fuel. It is my own experience and identity as a postcolonial/transnational feminist that shapes my understanding of Arab women artists’ lives, their experiences, and what they express in their work. As a stranger, as an artist, and as a researcher, I take this journey of knowledge production to try and open up a possibility for a new understanding of what it means to be an autonomous Arab woman artist, especially under the influence/constraint of displacement.
Local Note:
School code: 0176.
Electronic Access:
Click for full text
Thesis Note:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Pennsylvania State University, 2018.
Field 805:
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