Bearing Witness - the web blog.

The following posts will attempt illustrate how new literary forms are being embraced by marginalised identities to facilitate and enable acts of testimony during times of social and political upheaval. This blog will explore how life narratives and ethno-autobiographies from the contemporary Middle Eastern world are being voiced through new and diverse textual mediums in order to reach a wide and diverse readership. The central texts I will exploring is Marjanne Satrapi's graphic novel ‘Persepolis’ (2003) and Riverbend's ‘ Baghdad Burning - Girl blog from Baghdad' (2003). Utilising a post-modern feminist framework that decentres any claim to absolute truth, these posts will show how  new literary texts aid in the expression of dissent and protest, as well as an important space to express emotions such as grief and loss associated with times of war. I will explore how  the style of these texts appeal to audiences who are disenchanted with the political and corporate monopolisation of media providing a much needed alternative that radically resituates the human face onto the marginalised            ' Other'.  I will discuss the ways that these texts educate 'Western' readership (such as myself) in the experiences of  Muslim women's lives, particularly Marjane Satrapi's discourse on the Muslim ‘veil’. Using the texts as 'jumping off points' i will be looking at important critical social theories that aid in a close 'reading' of these new literary works. I will discuss the ways that these two female authors, through their unique textual expressions, have opened necessary spaces for dialogue that speaks to their ‘everydayness’,  both the ordinary and the extraordinary. These posts will elucidate how women who have been historically and culturally marginalised,  have paradoxically found ways to express themselves on the literary margins.