Phyllis Taoua is the author of Forms of Protest: Anti-Colonialism and Avant-Gardes in Africa, the Caribbean, and France (2002) and is completing her second book, Africa from African Perspectives: Their Voices, Our World and the Difference It Makes. Other publications have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, Transition, SubStance, Research in African Literatures, Cahier d’Études Africaines, and Journal of African Cultural Studies. In 2006 she was the recipient of a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation award and Resident Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The Arab Spring may have destroyed the perception that Arab cultures are inherently incompatible with democracy and the values of freedom, but writers of Muslim extraction who are politically and…