Hilary E. Davis

Reintegrating Sensibility: Situated Knowledges and Embodied Readers

It was over thirty years ago this summer that I, Deanne Bogdan, the senior member of this writing team, sat in the balcony of the theatre of the Canadian Stratford Shakespearean Festival, where I witnessed my very first live performance of The Merchant of Venice. Having studied the play in high school and at university, I had just finished teaching it to first-year secondary school students, and that day I delighted in the powerful springing to life of the characters on stage before me. The role of Shylock was played by the legendary Czech actor Fredric Valk, who electrified his audience with a portrayal of dignity and grandeur. Riveted into silence by the power of Valk’s delivery of the famous “I am a Jew. . . . Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech in Act III, I was presented with another drama of a somewhat different sort: at the conclusion of that soliloquy, a middle-aged man in the fourth row leapt to his feet, fist defiant, uttering a piercingly anguished “No! No! No! . . .” This speech occurs just after Salarino asks Shylock what would be accomplished by insisting upon an actual pound of flesh, whereupon Shylock replies: To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not

Reading Muslim women and Muslim women reading back: transnational feminist reading practices, pedagogy and ethical concerns

This special issue of Intercultural Education traces its origins to a conference panel examining the reception and teaching of Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. In mid-2004 when the panel was conceived, Nafisi’s text was the most popular among an explosion of memoirs, novels, nonfiction and children’s literature by and about Muslim and Arab women being enthusiastically marketed and consumed in North America. The papers on this panel focused on how Nafisi’s text was being taken up within an Islamophobic global context in which Muslim women were increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist pity, fear and fascination produced through a complex nexus of societal and imperial aggression. Now in 2007, the surge of writing and cultural production by and about Muslim and Arab women continues—texts which both challenge and perpetuate the currency of Orientalist writing and representation. Within the context of the current global and geo-political landscape and the ‘war on terror,’ competing imaginaries—Western imperialist, Orientalist, imperialist feminist as well as transnational feminist, anti-colonial and Islamic—form a contested terrain of knowledge production upon which the lives, histories and subjectivities of Muslim women are discursively constituted, debated, claimed and consumed through a variety of literary, academic and visual forms of representation. This special issue seeks to critically examine the ways these forms of representation are taken up in various educational sites and also to interrogate and reflect on

Reading Nafisi in the West: Feminist Reading Practices and Ethical Concerns

Iranian women’s memoirs have become increasingly popular in the West. Certainly the most popular of these has been Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. But in a world in which Muslim women are increasingly the subject of neo-Orientalist fear and fascination, Reading Lolita in Tehran cannot be read as neutral. We begin this paper by analyzing the ways in which discourses such as “the clash of civilizations” and “global sisterhood” shape the reception of Nafisi’s autobiography. We then examine how the autobiography is being taught, providing both a framework for problematizing current approaches to the text and a case study centred on teaching Reading Lolita in Tehran to a group of preservice teachers. We argue for a continuing interrogation into our own pedagogical practices and desires.

An interview with Jamelie Hassan

Jamelie Hassan is a visual artist and activist based in London, Ontario, Canada. Since the 1970s she has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. In 1993 she was presented the ‘Canada 125 Medal’ in recognition of her outstanding service to the community, and in 2001 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts. She was awarded the Chalmers Art Fellowship in 2006. Her interdisciplinary works incorporate ceramic, painting, video, photography, text and other media and explore personal and public histories and are in numerous public collections. These include the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum London; the McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the National Museum of Arab American Art, Dearborn, Michigan, USA and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.