Zahra Taheri
Abstract
This article, through a post-colonial feministic approach and the deployment of ideas by Whitlock, J. Butler and Emanuel Levinas tries to focus on the re-emergence of “Harem literature” through the new genre of Veiled Best-sellers. To this end, it focuses on the Sasson’s Mayada: The ...
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This article, through a post-colonial feministic approach and the deployment of ideas by Whitlock, J. Butler and Emanuel Levinas tries to focus on the re-emergence of “Harem literature” through the new genre of Veiled Best-sellers. To this end, it focuses on the Sasson’s Mayada: The Daughter of Iraq (2003) to discuss how such works have been abused to endorse neo-liberal policies and to justify the West’s attack on Afghanistan and Iraq; it, also, reveals how such works have been in line with the western policies of “war against terror.” It is argued that, despite the West’s attempt to attribute the popularity of such post- 9/11 works to the “white man’s burden” towards his “oriental sister” at that time, such “other-oriented” ethical discourse brings about no end to the liberal conception of subjectivity (as defined by modernist binary oppositions). On the other hand, it once more pushes the liberal humanism’s discourse of western racial supremacy and consequently justifies the neo-colonial wave in the West.