Fashioning the Modern Middle East: Gender, Body, and Nation

Description

In the first book to address the critical role of the (un)dressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East, these essays unveil contemporary struggles over nation, gender, modernity, and post-modernity. Contributions from leading interdisciplinary scholars, exploring gender representation, photography, dress, and visual culture recount the role of the visible elite body in campaigns for gender and social emancipation, dress histories concerning early nationalist women and men, and legal frameworks used by those who seek to control the movement of gendered bodies. The result is a rich picture of a historical period and cultural landscape which brings dress and visual culture back into historical narratives of the modern Middle East. Recognising multiple modernities, multiple imperialisms, and diverse regional experiences of post-colonialism, Fashioning the Modern Middle East contains a range of theoretical frameworks invaluable to students of fashion studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, photography, and gender. Bringing forward new primary material and re-investigating extant sources from new perspectives, this is the essential introduction to the role of the dressed and undressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East. Cover Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments 1 Mapping Modern Bodies in the Middle East: Introduction Reina Lewis and Yasmine Nachabe Taan 2 Fashion and the Camera: Istanbul in the Late Ottoman Empire Nancy Micklewright 3 Training Slaves for the Camera: Race and Memory in Representations of Slaves, Cairo, and Khartoum, 1882–92 Eve M. Troutt Powell 4 Patronage, Taste, and Power: Slave, Manumitted, and Free Subjects in the Fashioning of Middle Eastern Modernity Reina Lewis 5 Constantin Guys and the Painters of Global Modernity Mary Roberts 6 Looking At/As Nudes: A Study of a Space of Imagination Kirsten Scheid 7 Another Look: “The Body That Is,” Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Post-Ottoman Egypt Wilson Chacko Jacob 8 The Arab Garçonne: Being Simultaneously Modern and Arab in 1920s and 1930s Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt Yasmine Nachabe Taan 9 The Photograph, the Dress, and the Conjugalization of the Family Afsaneh Najmabadi Bibliography Index