Amira jarmakani biography definition

  • Jarmakani makes a lively contribution to this scholarship.
  • Insofar as the study of women in/ and islamic cultures has been defined by rigid notions of femininity and masculinity as complementary and dichotomous terms.
  • In these novels, identification with the white heroine requires a simultaneous counteridentification with Arab women, who are perceived to be passive, obedient.

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    New Texts Out Now: Amira Jarmakani, An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror

    Amira Jarmakani, An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

    J: What made you write this book?  

    Amira Jarmakani (AJ): The impetus for this book came when a dear friend and colleague, Evelyn Alsultany, sent me a link to a website called “Sheikhs and Desert Love.” The website, which now appears to be defunct, was operated by desert romance fan Erika Wittlieb from 2001-2007 and then seems to have been operated by Amazon for a few years. The latter shift demonstrates the popularity of desert romances (in other words, it was lucrative enough for Amazon to want to capture the desert romance fans who were visiting the site). At its height, the website catalogued so-called “desert romances”—mass-market romance novels featuring a sheikh, sultan, or desert prince as the primary (alpha male) hero. Thou

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    International Association for the Study of Popular Romance


    Jayashree Kamble fryst vatten the author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (Palgrave, 2014) and a two-time recipient of the Romance Writers of America Scholarly Research Award. She has published essays on war and espionage in romance novels as well as on romance reading, and has an essay on novel covers forthcoming in the collection Romance Fiction and American Culture. She recently published a short feature on the romance genre and community in the Oklahoma Humanities Magazine titled “What’s Love Got to Do With It?–In Romance Novels, Everything!” She is an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York.

     


    Amira Jarmakani is Associate Professor and Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. She is the author, most recently, of An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances and the War on Terror (New Yo

  • amira jarmakani biography definition

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    In recent years, there has been a surge of academic interest in the sheikh romance, or what some call “desert romance.” The term describes a small subgenre that appears primarily as category romance, in which the Western heroine finds herself at the mercy of a dominerande Middle-Eastern sheikh; common conventions of the novels include captivity, småsten, harems, invented geography, horses, and, ideally, feminist reforms in the sheikh’s sadly backward kingdom. These novels have a long and storied history, but one might have expected the events of September 11, 2001, and contemporary American military involvement in the Middle East, to make the form less popular. Instead, publication nearly quadrupled. Exactly how political events might relate to romance readers’ increased desire to read about sexy alpha sheikhs fryst vatten open to interpretation, especially since the majority of these novels are expressly free of politics, religion, and even real-world geography. An Imperialist Love Story: Dese