ABSTRACT
The melancholic hiatuses discussed in the previous chapter could be glossed as women’s testimonies to not being at home in the postcolonial nation. The texts engaged there mobilize a temporal/historical frame of critical remembering in order to call for the continued decolonization of the nation, its history, and women’s place in both. In this chapter, I want to focus on a specifically spatial thematics in Arab Muslim women’s creative practice. As Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose have argued, any ‘move toward the postcolonial moment’ also necessitates a ‘critique of transparent space and its false claim to mimetic representation’ (1994: 14). From a feminist perspective, the task is not limited to the exposure of macro-grids such as Orientalism that produce and shore up territorialized knowledge. We should also consider micro-spaces generated by overlapping (post)colonial and (neo-)patriarchal power/knowledge systems. Due to the production of ‘women’s spaces’ as cultural boundary markers in colonial and anti-colonial discourses, feminist reconfigurations of home have been central to feminist work that reflects on Arab Muslim contexts.
