Soft Weapons
eBook - PDF

Soft Weapons

Autobiography in Transit

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Soft Weapons

Autobiography in Transit

About this book

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi's comics, and "Baghdad Blogger" Salam Pax's Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies.

Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson's bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri's fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi's Persepolis, Nafisi's book, and Pax's blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

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Yes, you can access Soft Weapons by Gillian Whitlock in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Introduction: Word Made Flesh
  4. Arablish: The Baghdad Blogger
  5. The Skin of the Burka: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan
  6. Testimony Incarnate: Read My Lips
  7. Branding: The Veiled Best-Seller
  8. Tainted Testimony: The Work of Scandal
  9. Embedded: Memoir and Correspondents
  10. The Pangs of Exile: Memoir Out of Iran
  11. Bookends: AutoGraphics
  12. Notes
  13. References
  14. Index