{"id":76320,"date":"2014-03-04T14:09:30","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T19:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=76320"},"modified":"2024-07-01T16:43:33","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T20:43:33","slug":"pickens-book-explores-embodied-experience-in-african-american-arab-american-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/03\/04\/pickens-book-explores-embodied-experience-in-african-american-arab-american-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Pickens book explores embodied experience in African American, Arab American writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Assistant<\/a>

Assistant Professor of English Ther\u00ed Pickens. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Do the people you touch make you the person you are? If you are breathing, can your oppressors claim that you do not exist? Is a seemingly robust Magic Johnson really the best person to promote AIDS and HIV awareness?<\/p>\n

Questions like these drive a new book by a Bates professor examining the literary uses of bodily awareness in writings by Arab American and African American authors.<\/p>\n

The first book-length cross-racial study of narratives reflecting those groups, New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States<\/em> is the creation of Ther\u00ed Pickens, assistant professor of English. The book was published in February by Routledge.<\/p>\n

Putting these two cultural traditions “into conversation with one another,” says Michelle Wright, who teaches African American studies at Northwestern University, “takes the reader through a dazzling array of topics, from the construction of minority subjecthood and family politics to illness and medical practices.”<\/p>\n

Pickens’ focus is the narrative use of so-called embodied experience — “what it is to live inside a body,” she explains. “It isn’t just that we see, but that we interpret what we see. It isn’t just that we touch or breathe, but that our touching or breathing has meaning.”<\/p>\n

She says, “The book aims to answer the question of how blacks and Arabs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries make meaning out of bodily sense — how they mobilize their embodied experience, with all of its various and itinerant parts, to create social and political critique.”<\/p>\n

Pickens argues that African Americans and Arab Americans narratives tend to rely on the body’s fragility, rather than its exceptional strength or emotion, to create critiques.<\/p>\n

Authors discussed in New Body Politics<\/em> include:<\/p>\n