Editor’s Note

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.46.1.0004
• Published date: 19 January 2024
• Pages: 4-4
• Date: 19 January 2024

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EDITOR’S NOTE

This issue includes three articles. Sajjad Gheytasi’s “Echoes of Exile: Rememory

and Resistance in Salt Houses” studies Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses that reveals the

impacts of (re)memory, resistance, and identity on the collective life of a Pales-

tinian family. The novel interrogates these concepts while the Palestinian family

experiences ethnic cleansing and occupation.

The article explores Alyan’s treatment of “past” and its impacts on “the present

and future.” The role of the elders in integrating the past with the future enriches

identity formation that keeps Palestinian culture alive and to be used as a weapon

to resist the occupier.

Samir Abed Rabbo’s “Herzl’s Zionism and Settler Colonialism in Palestine”

interrogates Herzl’s colonial thinking and the thinking of his successors that ulti-

mately led to the establishment of the settler colonial entity in Palestine in 1948.

The author discusses the way in which the Zionists collaborated with European

antisemites to remove Jews from Europe and transport them to Palestine, and how

they ethnically cleansed the indigenous Palestinians to form “the Jewish state.”

The falsification of Jewish history and erasure of Palestinian history went hand-in-

hand with the appropriation of Palestinian culture in all of its dimensions to make

Judaism a nationality instead of a religion.

Ibrahim Abu Elrob’s article “Sexuality in Emerging Translated Modern Arabic

Literature: Between Mimicking and Dismantling the Eurocentric Narrative in The

Corpse Washer” examines the way in which the novel’s author, Sinan Antoon,

through the “self-translation” of his novel utilizes “the translation of sexually

explicit language [to arrive] at a resistant and hybrid cultural identity.” Abu Elrob

employs postcolonialism to discuss Antoon’s “translation-related ‘intervention’”

to produce a “hybrid discourse” to counter the Orientalist (Anglo-American)

discourse of Arab sexuality.

DOI:10.13169/arabstudquar.46.1.0004