Constructing a counter-memory of the stereotypical Arab female in Arabic fantasy literature

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My project, comprising of a 60,000-word Young Adult fantasy composite novel, The Storyteller, and accompanying 20,000-word reflective commentary, is the first comprehensive study applying Islamic feminism and hybridity theories to Arabic fantasy literature. The Storyteller is about the journey of a young girl with a fragmented identity attempting to find where she belongs. I will implement an old model of female heroism inherited from traditional Arabic epic literature in the modern context of Islamic feminist and hybridity theories. Islamic feminism negotiates religious and feminist identities, problematising the normative Western feminist discourse on Arab women. It's rhetorical device, multiple critique, considers inconsistencies in identity as a response to external silencing (Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 2001). I will examine the shift in representation of female identity in Arabic fantasy literature in three distinct periods, epic, modern and contemporary YA fiction. My reading will be shaped by hybridity theories, identity politics and Islamic feminism. Using the composite novel form, The Storyteller will be a demonstrative and investigative exercise into how identity can be shown in isolation in short stories, whilst also presenting a cohesive character in a novel. I intend to depict how identity, including actions, culture and motivations, are shaped by external factors such as oppressive regimes, relationship dynamics and plot, and thus is not a 'singular, unified identity' (Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 2001).This project will address the gap in scholarship by retroactively applying Islamic feminist theory to Arabic fantasy epic literature to examine whether modern texts have inherited an old model of female heroism. Additionally, there is little research on how Cooke's rhetorical device, multiple critique, can be implemented, investigated and linked with postcolonial theories of hybridity. My second objective is to explore how fantastic elements is viewed within the purview of religious doctrines, and thus an attempt at negotiating religious and feminist ideologies, and how these mystical elements are essential to the investigation of female identity due to their political and social subversive power in representing the hybridity of the colonised subject.I will investigate narrative and structural devices in Jayussi's translation of The Adventures of Sayf Ben Dhi Yazan (1999) and Lyons Tales from 1,001 Nights (2010). The crux of my research will centre around these texts. I will trace the heritage of identified narrative and structural traditions linking to female heroism and the fantastical in modern texts, Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (1995) and The Epic of the Riff-Raff (1994), whilst also exploring hybridity. Thereafter, I will examine the contemporary representation of female identity in YA fantasy fiction, Ahdieh's The Wrath and the Dawn (2015) and Ciccarelli's The Last Namsara (2017).The critical reading and creative praxis of this project will inform each other. I will address the erasure of female heroism in Arabic literature. I intend to identify the nuances in the identity of female characters and deconstruct the idea that they have a single, 'oriental', passive identity (Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 2001). The impact of this research will be widespread. The stereotype in western and non-western countries will be deconstructed, scholarship into the historical heritage of other cultures will be further investigated and implemented in practice.