Fashioning the Modern Middle East

Reina Lewis is Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK. She is author of Muslim Fashion (2015) and Rethinking Orientalism (2004), and editor of Modest Fashion (2013) and Gender, Modernity and Liberty (with Nancy Micklewright, 2006). Reina Lewis co-edits with Elizabeth Wilson the Dress Cultures Series at Bloomsbury Visual Arts.Yasmine Nachabe Taan is Associate Professor of Art & Design at the Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon.

These thoughtful essays on the historical meanings of dress, and what it might tell us about choices, compulsions, and self-representations, engage readers in the compelling work of interpretation. Narratives about power, these are also stories about visual archives: not only what they tell us, but how elusive they are. These scholars’ passion for the archives they’ve allowed us to view is evident. It’s a rich read.

• List of FiguresNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgements1. Mapping Modern Bodies in the Middle East: IntroductionReina Lewis and Yasmine Nachabe Taan2. Fashion and the camera: Istanbul in the late Ottoman EmpireNancy Micklewright3. Training Slaves for the Camera: Race and Memory in Representations of Slaves, Cairo and Khartoum, 1882-1892Eve M. Troutt Powell4. Patronage, Taste, and Power: Slave, Manumitted, and Free Subjects in the Fashioning of Middle Eastern ModernityReina Lewis5. Constantin Guys and the Painters of Global ModernityMary Roberts6. Looking at/as Nudes: A Study of a Space of ImaginationKirsten Scheid7. Another Look: “The Body that Is,” Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Post-Ottoman EgyptWilson Chacko Jacob8. The Arab Garçonne: Being Simultaneously Modern and Arab in 1920s and 1930s Palestine, Lebanon, and EgyptYasmine Nachabe Taan9. The Photograph, the Dress, and the Conjugalization of the FamilyAfsaneh NajmabadiBibliographyIndex