Nancy L. Stockdale. Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women 1800-1947.

PositionBOOKS IN BRIEF--SUMMER 2008 - Book review

Nancy L. Stockdale. Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women 1800-1947. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007. 246 Pages. Hardcover $ 59.95.

Nancy L. Stockdale set out to investigate unexplored areas of English encounters with Palestinians in the 19th century and early 20th century. Her main focus is on meanings and representations of the other or how English women "othered" Palestinian women. The British comers to Palestine used their knowledge of the Holy Land and played an active role in the imperial attempt to disseminate a dominant English culture. She explores how English women in their writings about Palestinian girls and women contributed to a larger pseudo-Orientalist imagery of an untrustworthy and backward people. She establishes how English women assisted in mandating British authority in the region. This facilitates the Orientalist project placed on the Orient presuming they are weak partners of the West.

Contact zones between Western and non-Western women are travel and missionary fields. By examining first travel literature, letters, and chronicles, British women portrayed Palestinian women as biblical characters not Islamic who...

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