Harem Histories

Harem Historiesis an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, while also attending to its representational and political uses by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East through encounters in and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or in popular historical novels published in Istanbul and Cairo from the late nineteenth century onward. Several of the contributors focus on European culture as a repository of harem representations, but most of them tackle indigenous representations of home spaces and their significance for how the bodies of men and women, and girls and boys, were distributed in social space, from early Islamic Mecca to early-twentieth-century Cairo.

Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt and books and essays on Arabic vernacular poetry, modern Arabic fiction, constructions of masculinity in early Arabic gender discourse, and the theory and practice of literary translation. She is an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction.