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In Touch: The Body and Sensibility as Historical Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2016

Marie Grace Brown
Marie Grace Brown*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kans.; e-mail: mgbrown@ku.edu
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Extract

When introducing the body as an interpretive framework, it has become almost cliché to cite poet and essayist Adrienne Rich's instruction that we “begin … with the geography closest in.” For well over a decade, scholars have addressed the body and its attendant intimacies as microsites for examining broad sociopolitical systems of race, gender, class, sex, empire, and nation. This focus on the body contributes to the ongoing feminist work of overturning the analytic dichotomy of public and private and has launched a much newer project of approaching our physical selves as historical subjects in their own right.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , August 2016 , pp. 565 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Rich, Adrienne, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (London: Little Brown & Co, 1994), 212Google Scholar. Adrienne Rich passed away just as this roundtable essay was sent to the press.

2 See, for example, Ballantyne, Tony and Burton, Antoinette, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ballantyne, Tony and Burton, Antoinette, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

3 Rich, “Notes Towards,” 212.

4 Turner, Terence S., “The Social Skin,” in Not Work Alone: A Cross Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Cherfas, Jeremy and Lewin, Roger (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1980), 112Google Scholar.

5 Gengenbach, Heidi, “Boundaries of Beauty: Tattooed Secrets of Women's History in Magude District, Southern Mozambique,” Journal of Women's History 14 (2003): 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Sarah Ghabrial's essay, “Gender, Power, and Agency in the Historical Study of the Middle East and North Africa,” in this roundtable.

7 Ko, Dorothy, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007), 102Google Scholar.

8 Quoted in Sharkey, Heather J., “Chronicles of Progress: Northern Sudanese Women in the Era of British Imperialism,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31 (2003): 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 el Badawi, Zeinab el Fateh, The Development of the Sudanese Women Movement (Khartoum: Ministry of Information and Social Affairs, 1966), 1–3Google Scholar.

10 GM Culwick, “Personal Correspondence, 1949–1952,” GM Culwick Papers, SAD (Durham University), 428/3/134.

11 Nageeb, Salma Ahmed, New Spaces and Old Frontiers: Women, Social Space, and Islamization in Sudan (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004), 3Google Scholar.

12 Burton, Antoinette, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.