All posts tagged: Journal of Levantine Studies

The Gender Gap in Publishing: Miral Al-Tahawy on Women Writers

Published by nathalie alyon

Female writers of the 21st century still face gender bias in publishing their work. I had trouble writing the above sentence. As a sentence, it’s not interesting. It’s expected and obvious with a tinge of whiny. I’m baffled between stating the obvious on the one hand, and the incredulousness of such a sentence being “old news.” The claim doesn’t even need much in the name of evidence. Otherwise, why would female writers still feel the need to use their initials, especially in male-dominated genres such as fantasy or thriller? If you don’t know the first name of J.K. Rowling, it’s because she preferred you didn’t. Nevertheless, the evidence is there for the unconvinced. VIDA, a non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the gender parity in literature, revealed that in 2010 The New York Review of Books covered 306 titles by male authors versus only 59 by female writers. The VIDA count, by no means a comprehensive study into publishing trends worldwide, exposes the gender bias in top tier literary journals. In other words, “venues that are known …

Nurcan Baysal: “Living with the Curse of the Armenians”

Published by nathalie alyon

Last week, on April 24, 2016 thousands of people around the world commemorated the genocide of the Armenians under Ottoman rule. Once century ago, between 1915 and 1917, hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in the lands that today make up the Turkey were deported from their homes, exiled to faraway lands, and murdered. The Republic of Turkey does not recognize the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians under the last years of Ottoman rule as “genocide.” According to the Turkish official position, the events were the unfortunate consequences of war wherein both Turkish and Armenian civilians perished, along with tens of other ethnic populations that call Anatolia home. Despite the state’s official denial, an era of reassessment and reappraisal has begun in the streets of Turkey, especially though the works of civil society organizations, academicians, journalists, and others. In this post, I would like to bring your attention to one such journalist and author, whose main focus is not the Armenians but rather the Kurdish minorities in Turkey. Nurcan Baysal is a Kurdish …

A World through Transcultural Eyes

Published by nathalie alyon

With globalization a trend of the past, cultures are no longer clashing but rather mixing, people are no longer stationary within the traditions that they are born into, but rather constantly evolving. Over two months have passed since I arrived back in my apartment in Tel Aviv. Once again there is a drawer designated for my underwear and I reunited with my electric toothbrush. Almost every day, I run into friends and acquaintances on the street. After all, Tel Aviv is a microcosm for cosmopolitan urban living. They ask if I have “returned.” I don’t really know what to say. I am here. For now. I don’t know if I will stay, how long I will stay, where I will go when I go. And I am fine with not knowing. My dear friend Aditi’s wedding in Portugal provided the perfect excuse for flying back to this rusty corner of the world. (Posts on Portugal are in the works). But I had other reasons, too. In Mexico, I realized that a year of gallivanting around …