No one can underestimate the impact of cyberspace on literary production. Arab writers themselves have already begun catering to their audiences through cybertechnologies. Synchronous communication [with its one or multiple relay chat and chattrooms] are virtual realities that serve as narrative strategies . The Tunisian 'Abd al-Majid 'Attiah's Khattuka Radi' and the Saudi Raja al-Sani's Banat al-Riyad, to mention but a few, as I will explain in this paper, have demonstrated how these computer-mediated communication have opened up narrative to new dimensions that were never there before to challenge not only hardcopy cultural production but also limits imposed on writing and circulation.

The digital revolution has ushered in modes of exhibitionism and voyeurism that are reshaping social interactions and undermining traditional power structures in the Arab world. With Oprah-like TV shows and such Internet sites as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, people are increasingly putting their lives on display. This exhibitionism blurs the distinction between private and public, and the social and the political, exacerbating the desire to see and be seen. This desire, however, could not be separated from a new political activism that exploits exhibitionism and voyeurism to critique power. Through images and videos of violation of human rights like police beatings in Egypt, captured by hand-held devices and circulated online, a voyeurism vis-?-vis practices of power mirrors the exhibitionism and voyeurism that is redefining the social. No longer restricted to ideological narratives of opposition to power, this new activism is taking shape as a result of an intolerance of the private, the secretive, the opaque, the inaccessible (as in lack of Internet access), and of all the attributes of authoritarian regimes and oppressive social structures. In this paper I argue that while a form of fadH (exposing; fadiha, scandal) operates as a multi-centered engagement with the political in the activist blogger community, for instance, it also characterizes a new literary genre, in which the author is redefined as a rapporteur, exposing his or her social milieu. The economy of exhibitionism and voyeurism is best represented in Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh, where the narrator-author casts her weekly revelations as a form of social critique and anchors fadH as the task of the new author. From Alsanea's scandalous chronicle, I turn to Khaled Khamisi's candid camera-like Taxi and argue that the appropriation of the maqama genre in this new work stages the narratives of Cairo's cabdrivers as a fadH of social and political realities. In these two examples, fadH characterizes a new critique of power at the intersection of literature and politics, virtuality and print, and the private and the public, redefining in this way the role of literature through a new form of engagement.

Whereas much of women's literature from other regions of the Arab world--Egypt, the Levant, Iraq, and most of the Francophone Arab North African countries--can easily be classified under the 'postcolonial literature' category, modern Arabian Gulf women's literature do not ordinarily fall within this category. This is because the latter--which, broadly viewed, is just a little more than half-a-century old--is not a product of the era of 'modernism' (in its Middle Eastern sense) occasioned by European colonialism. On the contrary, this literature belongs to the age of globalization--the age of satellite television, the Internet, and mobile telecommunication--with a large majority of it produced in the 1990s and in the first decade of this 21st century. Relying primarily on selected short stories and novels, this paper will examine the contributions of Arabian Gulf women writers to the debate on globalization and local culture. In terms of form, language, and style, the majority of these writers are conventionalists; but some of them, like the Kuwaiti Fawziyya Sh. al-Salim and the Saudi Raja' A. al-Sani', have been innovative in both the formal and stylistic aspects of their writings. In terms of content, the women have begun to explore societally-tabooed subjects like sexual pleasure, sexual revolution and freedom (including the practice of lesbianism in their own immediate environment). Some others, like the Kuwaiti Tayba al-Ibrahim, have ventured into the still-male-dominated literary domain of science fiction, thus situating their literature within the global context of technological experimentation and forecasting. An investigation of how their texts have been received by the public (particularly as covered in, and debated through, the media) will provide a clearer picture of the extent to which the writers have contributed to the awareness about the new trends of development in the concepts of gender and sexuality in contemporary Arabian Gulf society. I will emphasize an argument that most Arabian women's writing should be read from a crosscultural--specifically, the 'Islamic-feminist'--critical perspective. By so doing, we will be able to determine the extent to which these writers have internalized other--especially modern western, feminist--cultures and civilizations and at the same time externalized their own Arab-Islamic tenets and values, which have always been misinterpreted locally and misrepresented globally. Their literature is now embodying not just a new voice, but a new epistemology.

The recent successful collaboration between young Arab writers and independent publishers has not only redefined the Arab literary scene, but has also introduced new voices that are experimenting with language, themes, and narrative techniques. Literary critics have placed Seba al-Herz's The Others (2009, al-Akharun 2007) within the nascent literary genre represented by Arab and specifically Saudi Arabian women writers such as Rajaa Alsanea, whose literary contribution addresses the concerns of young Saudi women with varying degrees of humor and realism. Despite their thematic complexity and stylistic diversity, the generation of Arab women writers to which Seba al-Herz belongs has been acclaimed for its apparent transgression of the confines of Islam, the imagined Arab harem, and the threshold of heteronormativity. Al-Herz's novel, however, stages a unique exploration of the psychic and physical imprints of political violence and transgenerational memory, weaved in a complex narrative structure that deserves thorough investigation. In examining The Others, I argue that the personal and communal heritage of violence and loss that marks the memory of the Saudi Arabian Shiite protagonist haunts her present and triggers her recurring mental and physical collapses. The violent Saudi oppression of the Shiite communities in the eighties defines the novel's dark tone and consumes the epileptic narrator. Mirroring the ancestors persecutions on her own body, transforming it into a site of repressed violence, a theater of laments. This paper is specifically attentive to Seba al-Herz's writing techniques, which inscribe the narrative within a religious Shiite framework evoking religious imageries of collective suffering and internalized pain. Finally, I argue that through its thematic exploration of trauma and transgenerational memory, The Others distances itself from the representations of political violence in contemporary Arabic literature as it challenges its overarching ideological premises.

The Challenge to Theory in Arabic in the 21st Century Although Arabic literature has not been consistently involved in 'theory' as understood and disseminated in the academia in the West, there are nevertheless a number of Arab intellectuals' positions that engage with this issue since the reliance on ' the enlightenment ' discourse in nahda and post-nahda writings and theorizations. In self narratives and a number of treatises, counter narratives, metafiction, and poetic pieces this engagement with the enlightenment discourse sets the cultural and even political scene for achievements and setbacks that require further investigation. But this engagement falls historically between 2 prominent cultural blocks: one relates historically to cultural heritage and specifically literary and philological theory, and another moves headlong into the offers of the cyberspace and its post modernity transactions. The first portion of this paper interrogates the limits and prospects of classical and postclassical theories in relation to poststructuralist, postcolonial, and postmodernist approaches, like Todorov's updated perspective of the fantastic in relation to al-Qazwini's specific explication of this matter for example. The second part explores the impact of the encroaching media and communication on narrative and poetic products. It is my purpose to assess this thorny entanglement through a number of cultural examples and theoretical explications in order to map out probable tracks in theory and cultural products. Both parts intertwine in genealogies of similitude, resemblance, rational reasoning, and technologies of power that make up an enormous cultural production worthy of interrogation and mapping.