Oakland, CA - Brinda Mehta, professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mills College, has published a groundbreaking new book entitled Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing (Syracuse University Press 2007).

The book carefully assesses fixed nations of Arab womanhood by exploring the complexities of Arab women's lives as portrayed in literature. Encompassing women writers and critics from Arab, French, and English traditions, it forges a transnational Arab feminist consciousness.

Mehta examines the significance of memory rituals in women's writings, such as the importance of water and purification rites in Islam, and how these play out in the women's space of the hammam (Turkish bath). She shows how sensory experiences connect Arab women to their past. Specific chapters raise awareness about the experiences of Palestinian women in exile and under occupation, Bedouin and desert rituals, women's views on conflict in Iraq and Lebanon, and the compatibility between Islam and feminism. Provocative and enlightening, Mehta’s book provides new thinking to the timely field of modern Arab women's writing and criticism, and Arab literary studies.

According to Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, president of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, "Rituals of Memory is an original project. It is culturally vibrant, theoretically sophisticated, dynamic, and truly cross-cultural in its perspective. This book will provide a true understanding of the complexities of Arab women's lives through literature." 

"Mehta's sensitive, creative, poetic, brilliant analysis of Arab women's memory writing is a balm on the trauma Arabs face today,” said Evelyne Accad, professor emerita, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, American University of Beirut. “It is also a thought-provoking, awareness-raising book that will no doubt have a great impact on the literary criticism of the field." 

In February 2007, Mehta won the Caribbean Philosophical Association's Frantz Fanon Award for outstanding work in Indo-Caribbean thought for her book, Diasporic Dis(locations): Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the "Kala Pani.”

Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering innovative degree programs for undergraduate women, and graduate degree and certificate programs for women and men. Consistently recognized as one of the top 100 liberal arts colleges in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, Mills currently ranks among the top 20 most diverse liberal arts colleges. The New York Times recently selected Mills as one of three leading California colleges for students to consider.

In 2006, the Washington Monthly College Rankings named Mills a leading liberal arts college based on community service, research spending, quality of preparation for graduate education, and social mobility. In addition, The Princeton Review’s annual guide, the Best 361 Colleges (2007) included Mills for the second year in a row among top U.S. institutions offering students an outstanding undergraduate education.   Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California on 135 lush acres, Mills provides a dynamic liberal arts education fostering women’s leadership, social responsibility, and creativity.

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