Harem histories
Subtitle: envisioning places and living spaces
By: Marilyn Booth, editor
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Durham [NC]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780822348580; 9780822348696
Description: Harem Historica is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, as well as by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East evident in encounters within and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or the popular historical novels published in Instanbul and Cairo from the late nineteenth century onward. Several of the contributors focus on European culture as a repository of harem representations, but most of them tackle indigenous representations of home spaces and their significance for how the bodies of men and women, and girls and boys, were distributed in social space, from early Islamic Mecca to early-twentieth-century Cairo. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Early women exemplars and the construction of gendered space : (re-)defining feminine moral excellence / Asma Afsaruddin; title: Normative notions of public and private in early Islamic culture / Yaseen Noorani; title: The harem as gendered space and the spatial reproduction of gender / İrvin Cemil Schick; title: Caliphal harems, household harems : Baghdad in the fourth century of the Islamic Era / Nadia Maria El Cheikh; title: Domesticating sexuality : harem culture in Ottoman imperial law / Leslie Peirce; title: Panoptic bodies : black eunuchs as guardians of the topkap? / Harem Jateen Lad; title: Where elites meet : harem visits, sea bathing, and sociabilities in precolonial Tunisia, c. 1800?1881 / Julia Clancy-Smith; title: The harem as biography : domestic architecture, gender, and nostalgia in modern Syria / Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh; title: Harem/house/set : domestic interiors in photography from the late Ottoman world / Nancy Micklewright; title: Dress and undress : clothing and eroticism in nineteenth-century visual representations of the harem / Joan DelPlato; title: Harems, women, and political tyranny in the works of Jurji Zaydan / Orit Bashkin; title: The harem as the seat of middle-class industry and morality : the fiction of Ahmet Midhat Efendi / A. Holly Shissler; title: Between harem and houseboat : ?fallenness,? gendered spaces, and the female national subject in 1920s Egypt / Marilyn Booth.