Maria C. Zamora – författare

Nation, Race & History in Asian American Literature reflects on the symbolic processes through which the United States constitutes its subjects as citizens, connecting such processes to the global dynamics of empire building and a suppressed history of American imperialism. Through a comparative analysis of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, this study considers the ways in which bodies challenge the categories asserted in nation-building. The book proposes that underwritten by the vast histories of American imperial migrations, there are texts and bodies which challenge and reconstitute the ever-vexed definition of «American». In «re-membering» such bodies, Maria C. Zamora proclaims our bodies as actual living texts, texts that are constantly bearing, contesting, and transforming meaning. Nation, Race & History in Asian American Literature will engage scholars interested in cultural and critical theory, citizenship and national identity, race and ethnicity, the body, gender studies, and transnational literature.

Arab Modernities is a critical interrogation of some of the ideologies of so-called modernity and modernization in the post-colonial Arab world, with a specific focus on three political ideologies: liberalism, nationalism, and Islamism. By providing a critical analysis of the work of major Arab intellectuals/activists (namely, Abdallah Laroui, Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, and Abdessalam Yassine), Arab Modernities brings together three political ideologies that have hitherto been considered competing and even incompatible in the Arab world. This much-needed intervention is also best understood as an inquiry into one of the central paradoxes of post-colonial Arab societies (and Middle Eastern societies more generally): the rise of Islamism and Islamist fundamentalism at a time when global neo-liberalism has declared «the end of history». Arab Modernities is a sophisticated attempt to «name» contemporary Islamism and Arab nationalism and liberalism – to delineate the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions under which they first emerged, evolved, and ultimately failed, and thereby to shed light on Arab-Islamic societies at the current historical conjuncture. Arab Modernities argues against facile analyses that attribute the rise and subsequent decline of liberalism and nationalism, as well as the current rise of Islamism, to purely cultural, religious, or ideological factors and provides a rigorous, complex materialist critique, where Arab ideologies of modernity are placed in the context of the particular historical formation within which they have developed and to which they have responded.