Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit - Softcover

Whitlock, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226895262 ISBN 13: 9780226895260

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2006

Synopsis

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies.

Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

About this title

About the Author

Gillian Whitlock is professor of English, media studies, and art history at the University of Queensland and the author of The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226895262
• ISBN 13: 9780226895260
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258