Translation and Global Culture: Middle Eastern Women's Literature in the Global North

Abstract

The present paper addresses a few major questions concerning the politics of selection, translation and distribution of the works of the Middle Eastern women writers, such as: How does the knowledge on Middle Eastern women's literature shape geopolitical and gendered hierarchies, or is it shaped by it? What is the location of these texts within the academic hierarchy of knowledge? How can these texts that travel through translation be, in Spivak's words, de-anthropologised? The paper, therefore, examines the distribution of the works of women authors of the Arab, Persian and Turkic worlds translated into English and published in the U.S. recently. It focuses on the ways in which these texts, informed by the politics of reception and representation, and confined to a certain mode of discourse, are appropriated to symbolize gendered otherness in the curriculum of a diverse body of academic disciplines. The paper also discusses the ways in which these texts, depending on their success, move back to the Middle East, translated into other Middle Eastern languages once they are packaged in the West to be further appropriated in otherizing the other in the Middle East.