ALLS Future, Current & Past Issues
Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies , 2019
ABSTRACT
This article argues how Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and a... more ABSTRACT
This article argues how Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author’s scope to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.
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Elleke Boehmer 1 once wrote: " [The British Empire] was the Royal Navy and Queen Victoria, and th... more Elleke Boehmer 1 once wrote: " [The British Empire] was the Royal Navy and Queen Victoria, and the One Race and One Flag. But it was also represented by texts ". If the Empire and colonial power is perceived as a 'textual exercise', probably the vantage ground of the post-colonial world is the artistic and cultural productions of collectively referred to as post-coloniality. Although adopting bifurcated and multi-textured artefacts, resistance movements to colonial powers and their imperial aftermath have a domineering locale that is the cultural productions in forms of literature, cinema, music and media among others. As it goes without saying, post-colonialism or post-colonial theory that has stretched out to include various disciplines and schools of thought has originated from reading and analysing cultural products. The collection of the essays in the book conjointly entitled: " Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures: Literature, Cinema and Music " explores the power of cultural artefacts (literature, film and music) in promoting various aspects of social and political resistance to the postcolonial tyrannical regimes in the Middle East. It also examines the role of these artefacts to inculcate the mass social movements in their search for freedom, social and political justice, equality and democracy.
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'When the 'Other' Speaks' is my first collection of published poems written to depict the voice o... more 'When the 'Other' Speaks' is my first collection of published poems written to depict the voice of the oppressed and marginalised people living on this earth. Travellers who feel the whole universe is theirs, children who do not understand killing, those who are denied the right to move and live where they feel secure, and language and discourse that keep failing us to say exactly what we need to say, and more than often used to make invisible the real face of oppression,-all have the common theme of the eternal desire of the 'muted' to speak. I wish my readers would engage with these poems away from all ideology thinking and dogma; but with the inspiration of diaspora and nomadism. Above all, I wish to create, through those poems, moments of differentiation and negotiation between what we and others believe.
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An analysis of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad with its emphasis on cultural representations in... more An analysis of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad with its emphasis on cultural representations in the American culture, touches very significantly upon the question of the rising of the American identity and its connection with the American Travel Narrative in the nineteenth century. While it is believed that the novel produces "pure" "true knowledge " , or "a neutral exercise" of basic facts and realties, we argue that Twain's narrative entails a genre of political knowledge that is premised on the basic requirement of self/other constructions. The ideological apparatus of Americanized emerging identity, nationalism, power and authority are fundamental issues in the Twains narrative. Furthermore, it is not only the personal motif that is the basis of Twain's The Innocents Abroad, as he claims in his preface, nor is it a "Great Pleasure Excursion," as he pretends. The novel structures relations according to the rising American norms and values in the nineteenth century clearly acquired and absorbed by the American travelers in The Innocents Abroad. It also subscribes to the complication of the American character in order to develop, process and reconstruct cultural relations in the narrative. In this sense, we argue that Twain's narrative raises discursive ideological questions about the rising of the American national identity and its connection with other cultural components, the Oriental, in particular.
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This paper offers a critical review of the concept of 'culture', and argues that at this particul... more This paper offers a critical review of the concept of 'culture', and argues that at this particular juncture of our recent times the case against the concept has become prima facie a strong one. By tracing the various conceptualisations of the notion, its paradigms and schools of thought underlying the study of 'culture' in Western academy and beyond, I argue that in the 21 st century the notion of culture has little to offer in terms of reflecting people's ways of living. Following a post-colonial and Derridean deconstructionist repertories, I argue that the limitation of the term stems from its singular and latent form as it fails to reflect the mobility dynamicity, multiplicity and hybridity of current societies. The study is based on the premise that ''culture'' is thought of as hybrid, contested, and in constant (re)construction; not a noun but a 'verb'. I, therefore, put the concept 'under erasure' to challenge the taken for granted, fixed and unified meaning of the term and move beyond the limitations of several ways it has been studied and theorised. In so doing, I speculate on the relevance of the concept to the liquid post-modern era that is marked by the fragmentation of societies, the emergence of new identities, Diasporas, immigration and birth of cyber-cultures. Additionally, in post-colonial institutional contexts, I argue that the concept of 'culture' mirrors the honorific term of the 'canon' or (the canonised English literary tradition). I contend that both concepts signify archaeology of 'knowledge' of the existing matrix of power relations in academia as well as in world relations. Both concepts signify the adoption of monolithic discourses that still perpetuate the regulation and dissemination of the 'high cultural' or 'canonical ideology', particularly in post-colonial academic contexts. I conclude that, both concepts should undergo critical revision or 'erasure' since they fail to reflect the discursive aspects of human and artistic life. The paper contributes to the wider debate of issues around " culture " and the literary canon by adopting a deconstructive post-colonial argument.
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by Tariq Elyas, Kalina Maleska, Ayman Abu-Shomar, Amira Abdulaziz Saleh, Madiha Ahmad, Sofia Ahmad, Advances in Language and Literary Studies [ALLS], Mohammed H Albalawi, Sabariah Rashid, Issa Alkhutaba, and Fernandes Arung
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Drawing on post-colonial theory, the study offers a critical reading of the current status of the... more Drawing on post-colonial theory, the study offers a critical reading of the current status of the 'Middle Eastern' educational systems, the English literary education, in particular. It also considers the contribution of post-colonial theory in educational and literary studies by exploring possibilities to challenge hegemonic ideologies and relations of power in education. I argue that being at the heart of colonial relations, 'post-colonial' educational systems are still largely entrapped by a modelling approach which was rooted during the era of colonialism and further consolidated by the unequal contemporary world relations. The creation of this capitalised structure has established an enduring relational system between the centre and the margin; and in the long run, keeps the latter cleaving to the values of the first. In the literary sphere, such ideologies still perpetuate their regulation and dissemination of the 'high cultural' or 'canonical' traditions. In an attempt to address these inherent problems, the study explores the possibility of forwarding the post-colonial critical tenets by curving out wholesale the notions 'Hybridity', 'Third Space', Diaspora and Dialogism in the context of Critical Pedagogy. The study contributes to a wider debate in critical educational and literary studies by means of disrupting and problematising the meta-narratives and discourses of universality and standardisation. It also contributes to theory and pedagogy by exploring strands of theories so far believed to be discrete.
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Literary criticism nowadays is essentially crossing the boundaries of disciplinarity and canonici... more Literary criticism nowadays is essentially crossing the boundaries of disciplinarity and canonicity where literary theory has increasingly been shaped by overlapping concepts and branching out of theories as well as whipping out the limitations imposed by theory itself. The post-conditions of contemporaneity have imposed a view of reading and analysing the literary text that is dynamic, proliferated and in flux as well as resistant to monolithic critique and confined disciplines and professionalization. This outlook has increasingly made the notions of literary criticism, theoretical paradigms and canons not only artificial and irrelevant to our materialistic world, but, in many cases, 'violent' to those whose life concerns exist in the margins of these paradigmatic notions. In this essay, I argue that those of us who aspire to an interdisciplinary and a metacritical analyses would be well served by importing inspirations from Edward Said's work, scholarship and life, particularly drawing on his 'Worldliness', 'Amateurism' and 'Heteroglossia' (or heterotopia) as well as drawing examples from his negotiation with intellectual paradoxes and tensions informed by his positionality as a border crosser intellectual (or his exilic consciousness). Specifically, this article engages with Said as an author of a radically secular body of work marked by as comportment towards being, and as an example of an " amateur " critic who " speak[s] truth to power ". It argues that Said instates a critically-interrogative scholarship as antidote to essentialist, politicised, determinist and hegemonic literary canons (whether those of texts or theory) which are paradigmatically informed by relations of power in academia. The paper argues that through the investment of his scholarship and personal life, Said rejects academic institutions and affiliations with their tendency towards doctrinaire assumptions of critical work. Further to this, Said's fascination of diversity, heterogeneity and his advocacy of the intellectual's detachment from the institution of specialised criticism mount up as a radical critique of specialisation and professionalism and denouncing them as being allied with ideological and cultural dogma.
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The pronounced universalism, standardization and elitism of the American literary tradition in En... more The pronounced universalism, standardization and elitism of the American literary tradition in English departments in countries of former experience of colonization have created an enduring relationship between the center and the margin through processes of assimilation, integration and ambivalence. The literary text has become critically open to contestation among differentiated components: the old military conquest, daily institutional compulsion, and in progress ideological interpellation, which have become the basic features of the post-colonial culture. However, in place of opposition and contestation of the authorized colonial hegemonic performances, different forms of assimilation and integration were articulated and attended in these departments. In the long run, opposition discourses have developed strategies to cleave from the Center, and in order to achieve this, and, by adopting borrowed means from the Center, these opposition discourses cleave to the Center itself, which creates an ambivalent relation between the Center and the Margin. Within this understanding, the need for post-colonialist discursive negotiations that require the native rewrite him/herself (not) as an object of imperialism, but as a subject of contestation remains one major aspect of discourses of resistance. In this paper, we address the various interpellation processes in post-colonial literature classroom by which the critic and the literature teacher address the post-colonial subject and produce him/her as a subject proper of colonization or Americanization. In addition to rehearsing the existing literature of resistance discourses, we investigate the role of the authoritative text as a means by which colonial and post-colonial regimes have enforced this tradition in past and post-colonial territories. We probe the various processes by which colonial subjects assimilated, incorporated or disallowed and rejected the extended processes of their literary education. Drawing on our investigations and analyses of these processes, we propose further outlets for resistance and dissent to these practices.
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Abstract
Negotiating human conditions is an emblematic critical impetus of diaspora informed by m... more Abstract
Negotiating human conditions is an emblematic critical impetus of diaspora informed by multiple cultural possibilities practiced through the creation of multiple spaces that cross the realm of the ‘self’ to that of the ‘other’. It offers a locale to cross from the oppressed ‘self’ to an understanding of an oppressor ‘other’. Yet, diasporic negotiation is politically involved in the most responsible manner; it engages the contextual social realities in order to enable creative possibilities for overcoming the logic of the politics altogether. It invites a kind of political involvement that assures the ‘situatedness of the ethical’ in a framework of moral humanistic realisations. The realisation of diasporic negotiations is dialogically engaged in manners that will give birth to new possibilities for human togetherness. In this essay, I trace the signs of diasporic negotiations of politics, love and trauma in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin by focusing on the Diasporic identity of Amal (the central character). I consider the intersections between diaspora, dislocation of identity and the creation of negotiating spaces that qualify an 'epistemology of Diaspora' against essentialised and ethnocentric construction of realities. I argue that Abulhawa creates diasporic spaces and immense moral scenes to transcend a particular stance of politics via transcending love in opposition to suffering and tribulation. I contend that Abulhawa’s conceptualisation of Diasporic negotiations enables her to depict and gauge two extreme human sentiments: love and trauma, yet, without yielding or compromising the right of just resistance and dissent.
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A Collection of Poems
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Debate over the English literary canon has been revolving around questions of inclusiveness, repr... more Debate over the English literary canon has been revolving around questions of inclusiveness, representation, voice, relations of power, pedagogical practice, and others. My purpose, in this paper is, however, to explore issues around canons beyond the established arguments of 'institutional capital', and those of classic post-colonial arguments such as issues around representation. In an era that could be described by 'liquid post-modernity', criticisms should be directed to the core of the idea of canon itself, or the question one might ask: are canons still valid? While Guillory and other critics have thoroughly dealt with issues around the canon in the Western academy, the present paper investigates the post-colonial higher educational settings, in general, and the Jordanian setting in particular. For an investigation into this context, a qualitative case study was employed to gain in-depth insight into how the current English literary canon is perceived and disseminated by the instructors of literature at a Jordanian university. The data obtained via semi-structured interviews with these instructors suggested dichotomous and competing discourses regarding the canon. Drawing on Foucault’s view of relations of power, Bandura’s ‘human agency’ and ‘self theory’ and post-colonialist arguments, I conclude that the problem of the Jordanian English Literary canon could be understood as a variety of ideological thinking or what I call ‘canonical ideology’, where the proponents (conservative generation) and opponents (modern generation) of the current literary canon perceive themselves as having the capacity to understand their students and to make choices and impose these choices on them. Whether these instructors are for or against the canon, it does involve the promotion of a particular ideology; the canon, as a reflection of academic and theoretical fashions of the western academy.
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In this paper, we explore the development of a critical pedagogy that disrupts stereotypical and ... more In this paper, we explore the development of a critical pedagogy that disrupts stereotypical and ethnocentric convictions and articulations of culture, identity, and the 'self'. Drawing on the concepts of 'hybridity' and 'third space' (Bhabha 1994), 'diasporic philosophy', and 'dialogism' (after (Bakhtin 1981) , this paper explores the potential of 'Dialogic Spaces' (DS) to open epistemological outlets that enable hybrid, diasporic thinking in order to deconstruct dichotomising tendencies of thinking about difference. By contextualising dialogue in a wider cultural inquiry, research participants were called to navigate between new and familiar meanings and to recognize multiple and complex alternatives through the negotiations of cultural difference, hybridity and diaspora. Such 'positioning' encouraged them to question categorical, stereotypical, and hierarchical constructions of culture. In the creation of a third space, they came to recognize the plurality of cultural meanings, thereby working against essentialist meaning-making in such an interstitial space. They also came to acknowledge the legitimacy of the meanings of the other as well as those of the self. This study addresses to the broader cultural debate within postcolonial studies and critical pedagogy by raising awareness of cultural diversity, identity and representations of self. In this way it offers an original contribution by exploring intersecting areas of theory, so far believed to be discrete: diasporic philosophy, post-colonialism and dialogism.
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Dialogic criticism constitutes an ideal case for reading and interpreting literary texts as it do... more Dialogic criticism constitutes an ideal case for reading and interpreting literary texts as it does not talk about the text but to the text or more precisely with the text so that neither voice is excluded. It, according to Clifford, proposes a reading transaction that is precisely the space readers wish to explore as the borderland between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and a potent location to ask questions and have discussions. Both the reader and the text are opened, exposed, and the ‘self’ is strengthened rather than diminished. For a further investigation into these claims, a case study through the application of participant observer is conducted on four groups of graduate students in a ‘post-colonial’ educational setting to explore their dialogic engagement with a literary text. We contend that ‘dialogic readers’ go through a complex cultural exchange whose identities constructed not as an ‘archaic survival’ (Clifford), but as an ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished. Such a proposal could be taken up as providing sufficient power to guide literary criticism particularly in post-colonial educational contexts, and contributes to the field of literary theory and criticism. It also provides readers of an alternative approach to textual meanings and analysis.
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Although Caputo has coined the term of ‘post-paradigmatic diaspora’ for more than a quarter of a ... more Although Caputo has coined the term of ‘post-paradigmatic diaspora’ for more than a quarter of a decade, the term remained not in attendance by scholars concerning themselves in the science of epistemology in social and human research. Caputo himself used the term in the context of radical hermeneutics without providing sufficient engagement to delineate what the term comes to mean especially the term Diaspora. In this paper, I wish to engage with the term from the perspective of socio-cultural paradigmatic epistemology in social, cultural and human research to argue in favour of a proliferation of epistemologies in the era of post-modernity. In so doing I utilise the ancient argument of Frankfort School (namely: Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamen) of Diasporic Philosophy by offering another reading from the post-modernist vantage point. Diasporic philosophy acknowledges diasporic thinking which acts as a gate that unbinds the mind from the monolith of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and enables creative improvisations and births that make diaspora an impetus to new possibilities for happiness, meaning, aim, and togetherness. With the assumption that culturally and paradigmatically informed epistemologies entail essentialist, determinist and hegemonic approaches to ‘reality’ and meanings, I perceive a re-contextualisation of Diasporic Philosophy in this particular juncture of our history a compelling epistemology that guides our interpretations and meaning-making in the field of social research. In contemporary times where societies and identities are fragmented and new forms of social and political conflicts continue to emerge, I argue that Diasporic Philosophy could mount as a corrective locale to ethnocentric cultural discourses and work as antidote against the ‘violence’ and monolith of modernist certainties and positivistic approaches to knowledge. The paper contributes to the wider debate of the philosophy of meaning by offering an alternative epistemology that guides our analyses and interpretations of meanings in human and social research.
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This article argues how Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author’s scope to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.
Negotiating human conditions is an emblematic critical impetus of diaspora informed by multiple cultural possibilities practiced through the creation of multiple spaces that cross the realm of the ‘self’ to that of the ‘other’. It offers a locale to cross from the oppressed ‘self’ to an understanding of an oppressor ‘other’. Yet, diasporic negotiation is politically involved in the most responsible manner; it engages the contextual social realities in order to enable creative possibilities for overcoming the logic of the politics altogether. It invites a kind of political involvement that assures the ‘situatedness of the ethical’ in a framework of moral humanistic realisations. The realisation of diasporic negotiations is dialogically engaged in manners that will give birth to new possibilities for human togetherness. In this essay, I trace the signs of diasporic negotiations of politics, love and trauma in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin by focusing on the Diasporic identity of Amal (the central character). I consider the intersections between diaspora, dislocation of identity and the creation of negotiating spaces that qualify an 'epistemology of Diaspora' against essentialised and ethnocentric construction of realities. I argue that Abulhawa creates diasporic spaces and immense moral scenes to transcend a particular stance of politics via transcending love in opposition to suffering and tribulation. I contend that Abulhawa’s conceptualisation of Diasporic negotiations enables her to depict and gauge two extreme human sentiments: love and trauma, yet, without yielding or compromising the right of just resistance and dissent.
This article argues how Suzan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author’s scope to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.
Negotiating human conditions is an emblematic critical impetus of diaspora informed by multiple cultural possibilities practiced through the creation of multiple spaces that cross the realm of the ‘self’ to that of the ‘other’. It offers a locale to cross from the oppressed ‘self’ to an understanding of an oppressor ‘other’. Yet, diasporic negotiation is politically involved in the most responsible manner; it engages the contextual social realities in order to enable creative possibilities for overcoming the logic of the politics altogether. It invites a kind of political involvement that assures the ‘situatedness of the ethical’ in a framework of moral humanistic realisations. The realisation of diasporic negotiations is dialogically engaged in manners that will give birth to new possibilities for human togetherness. In this essay, I trace the signs of diasporic negotiations of politics, love and trauma in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin by focusing on the Diasporic identity of Amal (the central character). I consider the intersections between diaspora, dislocation of identity and the creation of negotiating spaces that qualify an 'epistemology of Diaspora' against essentialised and ethnocentric construction of realities. I argue that Abulhawa creates diasporic spaces and immense moral scenes to transcend a particular stance of politics via transcending love in opposition to suffering and tribulation. I contend that Abulhawa’s conceptualisation of Diasporic negotiations enables her to depict and gauge two extreme human sentiments: love and trauma, yet, without yielding or compromising the right of just resistance and dissent.