Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces

Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East evident in encounters within and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or the 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.

Contributors
Asma Afsaruddin
Orit Bashkin
Marilyn Booth
Nadia Maria El Cheikh
Julia Clancy-Smith
Joan DelPlato
Jateen Lad
Nancy Micklewright
Yaseen Noorani
Leslie Peirce
Irvin Cemil Schick
A. Holly Schissler
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh