Mehta's new text, Dissident Writings of Arab Women, focuses on the way in which postcolonial creative works by Arab women comprise a form of dissidence that provides alternate histories of the region, especially with regards to women's experience of war and other violence. Mehta asserts that these creative works (novels, short stories, poems, docudramas, interviews, testimonials, plays) represent the quest of writers to effect meaningful change in the world in the form of raised political and social consciousness, and new ways of thinking about the world. Mehta draws on a substantial body of postcolonial, feminist and literary theory to think about the political and cultural critique of these writers and the ways in which they may contribute to a changed consciousness about the experiences of women in colonial, postcolonial, revolutionary and wartime contexts.

She considers works that span fifty years, beginning with the Algerian war of the 1950s and ending with the initial stages of the Arab Spring uprisings. Mehta focuses on the work of women writing in French, English, Spanish and French verlan, (a slang that features inversion of syllables in a word) with one author writing in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. These authors are working from Europe, Africa, and the United States. She argues that by focusing on these writings she is representing a broad linguistic plurality in contemporary Arabic literature. This point is well taken. However, the presence of only one work penned in Arabic, when many are available in English and French translation, is perhaps one weakness of the volume.

The book is divided into three parts: Violence and War: the Algerian war story; Violence and Social/Sexual Oppression; and Staging Violence in North African Women's Theater. Part 1 explores the war-themed writings of contemporary Algerian authors Maïssa Bey, Assia Djebar, and Leïla Sebbar. With regard to these women's works, Mehta invokes Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of la facultad, which means the often unspoken but deep awareness of the world. She suggests that these writers’ access to this awareness allows them to recuperate and bring forward the experiences of women that are often obscured by the patriarchal configurations of colonial power, nationalist ardor and religious sentiment in Algeria. For example, Mehta treats the work of Maïssa Bey, whose Pierre sang papier ou cendre (Stone, Blood, Paper or Ash) describes the brutality of French colonization of Algeria and in particular, how French notions of the civilizing mission of colonization often led to the brutalization and rape of women's and men's bodies, and of the land itself. Bey writes from the child's point of view so as to privilege another disenfranchised viewpoint, but also to explore the sorts of questions that children ask, but which adults have ceased to raise. In part 2 of the book, Mehta investigates themes surrounding the abuse of the disenfranchised in Morocco, Spain, and France in the writings of Aïcha Ech-Channa, Faïza Guène, and Laila Lalami. These authors explore the abuse of vulnerable women and children at the hands of upper classes, and the social and sexual violence experienced by those who try to cross international and sociocultural borders. Part 3 of the book turns to two playwrights: Jalila Baccar of Tunisia and Laila Soliman of Egypt. Mehta offers an insightful discussion of Jalila Baccar's play Junun (Dementia), which figures madness as the search for self-expression and the natural result of patriarchal oppression and political censorship. Mehta's analysis is interesting and suggests that she is using a similar approach to women writing in Arabic, such as Salwa Bakr (The Golden Chariot translated by Dinah Manisty, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995) and Miral al-Tahawy (The Tent translated by Anthony Calderbank, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998), who explore women's madness as a response to the inhumanity of the police state and harsh patriarchal mores.

Mehta makes the important point that Arab women writers are not only attempting to employ the power of discursivity to transform reality but are also experimenting creatively with both literary forms and topics and in some cases, producing very original hybrid texts. Perhaps missing from the discussion here is some important recent scholarship on works in Arabic, such as Conscience of the Nation by Richard Jacquemond (American University in Cairo Press, 2008) and Egypt's Culture Wars by Samia Mehrez (Routledge, 2008) which also consider the dual approach of creative innovation combined with serious cultural and political critique. Mehta's interdisciplinary study will be most useful for students and scholars of women's and gender studies, postcolonial studies and Arabic and Francophone literatures.