Literary scholars Roxanne Douglas and Layla AlAmmar are calling for abstracts for a special issue on “Wombs and Tombs: Hauntings and Generational Trauma in Arab Women’s Writing,” to be aimed at Contemporary Women’s Writing or the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies:
Douglas and AlAmmar write:
There is a pattern in Anglophone scholarship which pathologizes Arab women’s writing, and Arab women more generally, especially around themes of trauma. That even if a text by an Arab woman writer is fiction, it is treated as an autobiographical account of the author’s trauma, or as confessional evidence of real Arab women’s lives as sociological objects of study. Tentatively titled Wombs and Tombs: Hauntings and Generational Trauma in Arab Women’s Writing, this special issue therefore seeks a new approach to the writing of Arab women through the lenses of Gothic Theory and Literary Trauma Theory. With few exceptions, Arab women’s literature has largely been neglected by these two paradigms, and so, this special issue seeks to fill the gaps in scholarship by bringing together innovative readings of this large and diverse body of writing.
Please submit your 300-500 word abstracts proposing 7,000-9,000 word articles, translations, or creative responses for a Special Journal Issue on the following suggested topics:
- Inter- and transgenerational trauma
- Hauntings, death, and the uncanny
- Mourning and Melancholia
- Undeath, liminal states and places
- Folklore, myths, and the irreal
- Postmemory, (re)memory, and memorializing
- Erasure, forgetting, and repression
- Testimony and narrative witnessing
Please email abstracts to WombsandTombs@gmail.com by 29th July 2022 and find the full call for papers here.
So interesting for an issue. I am in.