Women Challenging the Norms in the Arab Diaspora: Body Talks in Contemporary Art

As a specialist in twentieth-century French theatre, contemporary writing, photography and painting, Martine Antle (Professor Emerita, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) has published extensively on race and gender in twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone literature. Her scholarship spans the political, social, and cultural revolutions that shaped modernity from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. In her last book on surrealism (Cultures du Surréalisme, Acoria, Paris) she staged surrealism as a cultural crossroads characterised by its internationalism and cultural plurality. Her current research evolves out of her work on surrealism and the ways in which vanguard movements initiated an unprecedented dialogue on cultural diversity and were the first to map a global art scene. As a comparatist and europeanist, she is now working on east-west dialogues, women’s modes of resistance in Franco/Arab art, veiling and unveiling practices in Franco/Arab Art, sexual identities in contemporary transnational art and film of the Franco/Asian,Franco/Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas.