In Women and Gender in a Lebanese Village: Generations of Change, Nancy W. Jabbra presents a detailed analysis of change in gender roles in a Christian community in rural Lebanon.

Globalisation and transnational migration have altered people's understanding of as well as their relationship to their »dwelling places« and »places of origin«. Taking the empirical case of the South Lebanese Shi'ite village of Zrariye and its migrant population in Abidjan/Côte d'Ivoire, the book shows how »place«, which has become a vital political, economic and social resource, continues to be of tremendous significance in the age of mobility and change. »Lebanese in Motion« explores how villagers »at home« and »abroad« are involved in producing a »translocal village-in-the-making«, which emanates as a social field through their practices and narratives. Travel and the means of communication make it possible to keep in constant touch and thus renegotiate kinship, generational and gender relationships beyond local, regional and nation-state boundaries. Particularly interested in understanding how female identities are redefined, the study delineates how gender and place are mutually constituted in the translocal village under study.

Without a systematic gender analysis at all levels of agricultural and rural policy, the role of women will remain officially unrecognized and undervalued. The production and collection of sex-disaggregated data in rural areas would significantly facilitate the development of projects adapted to the real needs of rural women. Gender mainstreaming across relevant institutions through specific trainings and awareness raising is similarly needed. The purpose of this assessment is to provide recommendations for the Government of Lebanon, its institutions and FAO.

The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. In scope, the book encompasses the genesis of the Arabic novel in the second half of the nineteenth century and its development to the present in every Arabic-speaking country and in Arab immigrant destinations on six continents. Editor Waïl S. Hassan and his contributors describe a novelistic phenomenon which has pre-modern roots, stretching centuries back within the Arabic cultural tradition, and branching outward geographically and linguistically to every Arab country and to Arab writing in many languages around the world. The first of three innovative dimensions of this Handbook consists of examining the ways in which the Arabic novel emerged out of a syncretic merger between Arabic and European forms and techniques, rather than being a simple importation of the latter and rejection of the former, as early critics of the Arabic novel claimed. The second involves mapping the novel geographically as it took root in every Arab country, developing into often distinct though overlapping and interconnected local traditions. Finally, the Handbook concerns the multilingual character of the novel in the Arab world and by Arab immigrants and their descendants around the world, both in Arabic and in at least a dozen other languages. The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions reflects the current status of research in the broad field of Arab novelistic traditions and signals toward new directions of inquiry.

Thirty years after the end of the civil war, Lebanese women are still struggling for gender equality. This study builds on recent scholarship on women’s activism in the Arab world, in the context of the Arab Spring. It examines how discourses of secularism and equal civil rights have informed the contemporary Lebanese women’s movement in their campaigns for a domestic violence law, women’s nationality rights, a women’s quota in parliament, the reform of personal status law and the recognition of civil marriage. This book argues that women are caught between sect and nation, due to Lebanon’s plural legal system, which makes a division between religious and civil law. While both jurisdictions allocate women relational rights, guided by the logic of patrilineal descent, women’s inequality is central to the reproduction of sectarian difference and patriarchal control within the confessional political system, as a whole.

Synthesizing the results of the extensive research on women and gender done over the last twenty years, Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker provide an accessible overview of the scholarship on women and gender in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East. The book is organized along thematic lines that reflect major focuses of research in this area—gender and work, gender and the state, gender and law, gender and religion, and feminist movements—and each chapter is written by a scholar who has done original research on the topic.