Desert Voices

Moneera Al-Ghadeer is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Wisonsin-Madison.

'This is a truly unique book. It presents material and analysis that is highly original in the fields of Bedouin oral literature, not to mention the broader field of Arabic literary studies - One senses at times that one is in the presence of a truly gifted thinker into whose hands this Arabian women's poetry was unbelievably fortunate to fall - In simply taking seriously for the first time ever this magnificent poetry and bringing it, hopefully for good, into the canon of Arab poetry, this book is an important breakthrough. The exquisite translations of this poetry which has never before been translated, or even remarked upon, would in themselves make the book worth publishing; the rich exegesis and interpretation and the philosophical reflections on melancholy, loss and voice that frame the poetry add to the value.' - Lila Abu-Lughod, William B. Ransford Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University; 'Professor Al-Ghadeer draws attention to the much-neglected poetry from the Arabian peninsula created by women; indeed, she goes a long way towards making this largely oral tradition available to an English-speaking audience - In her analysis of these poems in Desert Voices, she makes an incredibly convincing case that Bedouin women's poetry can be brought into conversation with European and American literary theory for the benefit of 'theory' as well as for our own understanding of the poetic corpus she examines. The theoretical tendencies with which Professor Al-Ghadeer is most in conversation with are psychoanalysis and deconstruction - She draws on comparative methods to articulate a model for reading non-Western literatures in a Western context as a kind of translation in conversation with Western theoretical paradigms.' - Jarrod Hayes, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Associate Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

• * Reading the Nomadic Voices * The Exclusion of Women’s Poetry * Nomadic Voices * Rhetoric of Love * Melancholic Desire * Melancholy from Europe to Arabia and Back * Melancholic Desire * Grief and Gender Grievance * Malady of Grief * She Mourns Like Desert Animals * A Desert Lost * Three Masquerading Tropes: The Fiction of Face and Voice * Technology and Postcoloniality: Algeria and Arabia * Ambivalence and the Radiophonic Voice * Instrumental Technology: Conflict and Fantasy * Dying to Travel in a Car * Feminine Desire and Technology * The translatability of the Nomadic * Bedouin Ethos and the Untranslatable * Translation and the Metaphor of Modernity * Works Cited * Index *