This issue includes three articles. Ahmad Qabaha and Abdel Karim Daraghmeh’s article “A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man’” examines Mahmoud Darwish’s poem to discuss the commonality among the colonized peoples through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism, theories of settler-colonialism, and indigenous ecologies. In his poem, Darwish, the authors argue, “represents the central ecocritical argument that environmental issues are integral to the existence of colonized peoples.”
Bayan Al-Dahiyat and Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh’s aticle “Imagining a Poetics of Loss: Building Communities in the Works of Joy Harjo and Saadi Youssef” argues that Harjo’s and Youssef’s poetry “becomes the imagined geography of the Muscogee nation and Iraq respectively.” Basing their argument on Bill Ashcroft’s theory of Postcolonial Utopianism and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” the imagined decolonized homeland appears to defy the colonizer’s practice of the erasure of indigenous memory. This is accomplished by indigenous struggles against the colonialists and their narratives. The authors posit that their article is part of the effort to imagine national identity and nation in ways that counter the colonialist’s formulation of those constructs.
Dima Tahboub’s article “The Cutting Edge between Nationalistic Commitment (Iltizam) and Literary Compulsion (Ilzam) in Palestinian Literature” discusses war literature within schools of social thought and literary criticism by using Palestinian literature as a case study. The author distinguishes between war literature and antiwar literature. Utilizing the Sartrean school of commitment, Tahboub discusses the stages of Palestinian literature from 1948 till the present and highlights the way in which writers have reconciled literary representation and Iltizam, the Arabic for commitment. The discussion is enriched through situating the topic in the context of social realism and national commitment.