Betty Mahmoodys oförklarliga huvudvärk
Populärorientalismen och behovet av Den Andre
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54807/kp.v3.32161Nyckelord:
not without my daughter, inte utan min dotter, orientalism, the orient, taboos, the western world, individualization, emancipation, den andre, the otherAbstract
The article is an analysis of Betty Mahmoody's book Not Without My Daughter. The book is related to the oriental discourse in which the West has constructed a picture of the Orient, one discussed mainly by Edward Said. A leading idea is that this discursive Orient is useful in the West: it is used partly to strengthen the feeling in the western world of being select and superior, and partly to work on that which is suppressed and tabooed in western culture itself. Not Without My Daughter can be understood as a myth which answers to a need to deal with the strong ambivalence that permeates the process of individualization and emancipation in late modernity. As such, Not Without My Daughter is useful in three ways: 1. It normalizes the modern life by denormalizing another life. 2. It detaches through doubling that which we would rather not know about in our own culture. 3. It gives us a foundation of meaning with the power to break down the listlessness and confusion of modern life.
