Nationalist Didacticism in Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: "Tales of a Harem Girlhood"

Year 2011, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 1 - 11, 30.06.2011

Sihem Arfaoui Abıdı

Abstract

Running counter to the imperialist claim of Children's literature as a European invention and manifestation, this article goes a step further by reading into the ideological interpellation of Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. Published in 1994, Dreams of Trespass is explored as an African children's text that reads into national education as a means to and a backbone of childhood education. Mernissi's text undermines the child-adult binary (and beyond it the personal/ political split) in the process of exemplifying the formative impact of Moroccan nationalism on the Mernissi children and vice versa

Keywords

Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, national heroism

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