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Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official. Miriam Cooke
San Diego State University, USA
Correspondence: jholslin@mail.sdsu.edun
2007. Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 196. £46.99
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"Our literature never leaves the country." These words of Syrian women writers clarify a common problem faced by writers all over the Arab world. In the Western imaginary, the facile image of a silent, veiled woman, inviting heroic Western intervention, often stands in for the complex Middle Eastern societies and histories about which readers in the West often know little. This new scholarly memoir by Miriam Cooke, American professor of Arabic Literature and specialist on Arab women writers, illuminates the complex geopolitical conditions shaping literature and cultural production in Syria today. Cooke sets out to deliver Syrian writing to the West, in eight chapters that weave together close readings of short stories, novels, poetry, and films with biographical sketches and interviews with Syrian women writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and political prisoners. Yet, as