الفهرس 
The Middle East and the West: a Tense History of PoliticsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
In the last few decades, the Middle East has acquired attention and focus in Western media. This attention has stimulated writers and artists to work on several productions which belong to a recent phenomenon that marks a thirst to know more about the region especially after 9/11. This research traces how this obsession is evident through a study of two plays by two Arab American playwrights, Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire (2003) and Betty Shamieh’s Black Eyed (2005), and a documentary book by the Australian-American Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire (1995).
This comparative study attempts to find an answer to questions related to the way the West conceives the Middle East. It also examines the authors’ interaction with the consequences of the turbulences in the region and how their backgrounds and origin affect their methods of expression and representations of Middle Eastern women. The three authors claim that they are in a position which provided them with special information about those women and motivated them to write these texts. Furthermore, this thesis attempts to analyse the authors’ positions and whether they are authentic or reactive to the media and western governmental statements especially in the United States of America where the three texts are written.
Heather Raffo is an Iraqi-American actress and playwright who is a winner of Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Special Commendation and the Marian Seldes-Garson Kanin Fellowship for her play Nine Parts of Desire (2003). After extensive search and interviews carried out for ten years, she wrote this play which is about
the dilemma of the Iraqi women during the years of sanctions and war. The play was first performed on stage in 2003 in England and then kept touring the United States of America.
Betty Shamieh is a Palestinian-American playwright author, screenwriter, and actor. She was born in San Francisco to Palestinian-American parents from Ramallah. Her works have been translated into seven languages. Shamieh’s work is known for addressing Palestinian women’s issues and the struggle with living in diaspora. Being the first Palestinian-American to have a play premiere off-Broadway., Shamieh premiered The Black Eyed on the Magic Theatre in 2005. The play had many tours and was performed in Greece as well.
Geraldine Brooks is an American-Australian novelist and a correspondent who won in 1990 the Overseas Press Club Award for best print coverage of the first Gulf War. She spent six years in the Middle East, and as a woman she had an advantage of mingling with women easily. Thus, she had an opportunity to know more about their hidden world and document this experience in her book Nine Parts of Desire (1993) which has become an international bestseller.
The research is divided into three main chapters, in addition to the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction examines the contemporary American scene to which the authors reacted through these works. The first chapter is about the historical and political relationship between the West and the Middle East and how it forms the background of the three works. The Second one discusses how the authors represent the Middle Eastern women in their texts. The third chapter tackles the identity crises and shows how the characters
are always in quest for creating one. Finally, the conclusion recapitulates the different points discussed in the thesis and gives the final result of the research.