Arab Studies Quarterly

Issue Number

Latest documents

• Books in Brief
• Editor’s Note
• Brehony, Louis. Palestinian Music in Exile: Voices of Resistance
• Echoes of Exile

  This article delves into the intricacies of memory, resistance, and identity within the context of Palestinian experiences, as portrayed in Hala Alyan’s novel, Salt Houses. This study examines the profound impact of rememory on the collective consciousness of a Palestinian family haunted by forced expulsions, upheavals, and the enduring cycle of occupation and forced migrations. The essay underscores that residual elements of past are not a passive recollection but active agents that shape the present and future. It highlights how traumatic pasts, passed down through generations, become an enduring legacy, connecting history with contemporary realities. Drawing on the characters’ experiences, it showcases how the struggle for identity and resistance against displacement is interwoven with the memory of ancestral trauma. Furthermore, the research explores the role of elder Palestinians, especially grandmothers, in preserving cultural heritage and transmitting stories that bridge generations. These narratives serve not only to understand history but also as a means of challenging occupation and advocating for the right of return. The article investigates the dissonance between imagined homelands and present-day realities, shedding light on the challenges faced by subsequent generations attempting to reclaim their heritage.

• Arab Studies Quarterly
• Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine

  This article examines Zionist claims to colonize Palestine and the role of Great Britain and prominent European Zionist Jews in the effort to establish Israel. Theodore Herzl, his lieutenants, and supporters personify Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” while acting and appearing as respectable statesmen, scientists, journalists, and businesspeople who advocated for freedom, liberation, and combating antisemitism. They deliberately collaborated with known antisemites and worked to dismantle ancient Jewish communities, relentlessly removing Jews out of their countries of origin, colonizing Palestine for the creation of a Jewish state, ethnically cleansing the indigenous people of Palestine, fabricating history, erasing Palestine and its long history, demeaning and oppressing the Palestinian people, and suppressing and appropriating Palestinian culture.

• Tusiani, Michael D. And Anne-Marie Johnson. From Black Gold to Frozen Gas: How Qatar Became an Energy Superpower
• Sexuality in Emerging Translated Modern Arabic Literature

  This article addresses the question of how The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon employs the translation of sexually explicit language to present a “resistant and hybrid cultural identity.” Adopting a postcolonial framework, the article explores the kinds of literary, linguistic, and translation-related interventions Antoon exerts to provide a hybrid-discourse to the hegemonic Anglo-American discourse of Arab sexuality, particularly through the creative and conscious self-translation of his novel.

• Essay by the Editor
• Decolonizing English Literature Departments At Arab Universities

  Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is inevitably and intricately linked to the production, ordering, and dissemination of revolutionary, anti-colonial knowledge. This article emphasizes the urgency for decolonizing education, specifically English literature departments at Arab universities. Many thinkers have documented the connection between literature, culture, and imperialism on the one hand (Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, 1989 and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, 1993) and literature, culture, and resistance on the other hand (Fanon, Kanafani, Cabral, Said, and others who wrote about zero point epistemology). While there have been some decolonization efforts in different parts of the world, even at Ivy League institutions (Cornell University, for example), Arab universities ironically maintain a very rigid, government accredited English and American literary curriculum with no attempt or intention at decolonizing these colonial era curricula. This article interrogates the aims behind maintaining a purely English (and American) literary curricula, especially as the Arab region continues to undergo the most violent and aggressive forms of Western intervention, which has led to massive destruction of Arab state infrastructures, the loss of Palestine in 1948, the dissolution of the social fabric of Arab societies and thousands of deaths in the past two decades. Against this destructive Western agenda, a constructive, awareness raising impulse embedded in a literature/culture of resistance is in order. It is high time that Arab universities decolonize their English literature departments, a necessary transformation that entails, to quote the title of an essay by Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom” (2009).

Featured documents

• Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine

  This article examines Zionist claims to colonize Palestine and the role of Great Britain and prominent European Zionist Jews in the effort to establish Israel. Theodore Herzl, his lieutenants, and supporters personify Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” while acting and appearing as...

• Sexuality in Emerging Translated Modern Arabic Literature

  This article addresses the question of how The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon employs the translation of sexually explicit language to present a “resistant and hybrid cultural identity.” Adopting a postcolonial framework, the article explores the kinds of literary, linguistic, and translation-...

• Books in Brief
• On the Violence of Self-Determination: The Palestinian Refugee as the Ontological Other

  The discourse on migration and refugee studies continues to be framed around two main principles: sovereignty and identity. In contemporary politics, however, the refugee subject is defined and managed from a universal framework where the language of rights elevates the potency of liberalism as...

• The Axis Of Resistance And Imperialism In West Asia

  The main thesis in this article is that the Axis of Resistance, at the center of which is the Palestinian struggle for liberation against the settler-colonial entity (Zionist entity) in Palestine, leads the fight against imperialism in West Asia. This struggle must be situated in its regional and...

• Dancing On The Edge Of Oblivion

  This article discusses the current precarious state of the US economy vis-à-vis the rise of China and the US proxy war in Ukraine. It discusses the problematic of a capitalist economy and the fundamental requirement of capital accumulation to avert and circumvent capitalist cyclical crises. It also ...

• Decolonizing English Literature Departments At Arab Universities

  Education in the Arab world is in need of a revolution, and this revolutionary transformation is inevitably and intricately linked to the production, ordering, and dissemination of revolutionary, anti-colonial knowledge. This article emphasizes the urgency for decolonizing education, specifically...

• US Media Darlings: Arab and Muslim Women Activists, Exceptionalism and the “Rescue Narrative”

  Using critical textual analysis based on the postcolonial school of thought, this essay analyzed a ten-minute segment, called “Women of the Revolution,” on the ABC news program This Week, anchored at that time by Christiane Amanpour, for...

• Two September Weeks That Saved Damascus in 1918

  The final two weeks of September 1918 were crucial for the modern history of Damascus. They marked exodus of the Ottoman Turks and entry of the Allied Forces, yet they have received mediocre attention from World War I historians. Most literature on the Great War in the Middle East covers British...

• Najd, the Heart of Arabia

  Throughout history and up until the middle of the twentieth century, available information about Najd, the vast central region of the present-day Saudi Arabia, had generally been scarce, especially in languages other than Arabic. Najd of the past had a unique and distinctive culture that deserves...