This book aims to provide the first detailed investigation of Arab life writing as part of a cultural corpus of resistance literature. This literature, it contends, must be contextualised and understood within specific fields of power discourse. More specifically, this book argues for a reinvigorated post-colonial understanding of contemporary Arab women’s autobiographical writing as revolutionary and dissident cultural practice. In doing so, it also aims to promote a critical dialogue between the sub-fields of Arab women’s writing, auto/biographical theory and resistance literature. Modern and contemporary Arab auto/biography has flourished in contexts of diverse, yet overlapping, colonial and anti-colonial struggles, and thus situates its subject at a particular political and historical juncture (Nasser 2017: 2). In the twenty-first century Arab world, a volatile region marked by (post)colonial histories and ongoing manifestations of Orientalism, colonialism, (neo)imperialism and revolutionary resistance movements (uprisings/ḥirāks), autobiographical discourses have become important cultural vehicles which highlight the relationship between political movements and artistic forms of literary expressions. They constitute an important, and ever-emerging, cultural corpus for bearing witness, testimony and dissidence as well as for political responses which foreground the relationships between writing and fighting and between the activist writer and the writer activist.

However, there remains a surprising lack of sustained academic discussions on forms of Arab life writing as politically driven practices which emerge in contexts of revolutionary and dissident moments, particularly from a gendered perspective. The leading scholarly discussions on and conceptual frameworks of resistance literature do not give much attention to life writing forms, including Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal work ʾAdab Al-Muqāwama fī Filasṭīn al-Muḥtalah 1948–1968 (1966) (Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966, 2013), Barbara Harlow’s classic Resistance Literature (1987) and, more recently, Karima Laachir’s and Saeed Talajooy’s edited collection of essays Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Culture (2013). While the latter, the closest study to the context of my book in terms of conceptual framework and geopolitical scope, establishes an important and elaborate connection between cultural forms of expression and dynamics of power in some of the countries of the contemporary Arab world, its scope is broad in terms of media of artistic expression.