Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces

Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and 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 Istanbul 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.


Contributors. Asma Afsaruddin, Orit Bashkin, Marilyn Booth, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Julia Clancy-Smith, Joan DelPlato, Jateen Lad, Nancy Micklewright, Yaseen Noorani, Leslie Peirce, İrvin Cemil Schick, A. Holly Schissler, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Introduction / Marilyn Booth  1

I. Normative Images and Shifting Spaces  

1. Early Women Exemplars and the Construction of Gendered Space: (Re-)Defining Feminine Moral Excellence / Asma Afsaruddin  23

2. Normative Notions of Public and Private in Early Islamic Culture / Yaseen Noorani  49

3. The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender / Irvin Cemil Schick  69

II. Rooms and Thresholds: Harems as Spaces, Socialities, and Law  

4. Caliphal Harems, Household Harems: Baghdad in the Fourth Century of the Islamic Era / Nadia Maria El Cheikh  87

5. Domesticating Sexuality: Harem Culture in Ottoman Imperial Law / Leslie Pierce  104

6. Panotopic Bodies: Black Eunuchs as Guardians of The Topkapi Harem / Jateen Lad  136

7. Where Elites Meet: Harem Visits, Sea Bathing, and Sociabilities in Precolonial Tunisia, c. 1800–1881 / Julia Clancy-Smith  177

8. The Harem as Biography: Domestic Architecture, Gender, and Nostalgia in Modern Syria / Heghmar Zeitlian Watenpaugh  211

III. Harems Envisioned  

9. Harem/House/Set: Domestic Interiors in Photography from the Late Ottoman World / Nancy Micklewright  239

10. Dress and Undress: Clothing and Eroticism in Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Harem / Joan DelPlato  261

11. Harems, Women, and Political Tyranny in the Works of Jurji Zaydan / Orit Bashkin  290

12. The Harem as the Seat of Middle-class Industry and Motality: The Fiction of Ahmet Midhat Efendi / A. Holly Shissler  319

13. Between Harem and Houseboat: "Fallenness," Gendered Spaces, and the Female National Subject in 1920s Egypt / Marilyn Booth  342

Bibliography  375

Contributors  401

Index  405

About The Author(s)Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt, and books and essays on Arabic vernacular poetry, modern Arabic fiction, constructions of masculinity in early Arabic gender discourse, and the theory and practice of literary translation. She is an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction.





http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=16452&viewby=title