Illuminates the emotional significance of stories in response to racial traumas related to the Middle East.Finalist for the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the GLBT category With a focus on aesthetic texts that narrate stories about or from the Middle East, The Better Story offers fresh insights into political conflict. Dina Georgis argues that narrative is an emotional resource for learning and for generating better political futures. This book suggests that narrative not only gives us insight into social constructs, but also leads us into understanding the enigmatic processes by which we become and give our "selfs" over to collective memories, histories, and identities. Stories link us to queer "forgotten" spaces that official history has discarded. The Better Story argues that feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies have not helped us think about lives that do not neatly fit into the valorized logic of resistance and emancipation.