This issue features three articles. Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar and Wadha R. Alathba’s article “A Derridean Approach to Qatar’s Paradox of Hospitality: FIFA, Souq Waqif and the Ship of Theseus” counters the orientalist notion of Qatar’s inhospitality that was presumably exhibited during the country’s hosting of the World Cup. Utilizing Derrida’s theory of hospitality, the co-authors “contextualize and problematize the paradoxical personality of Qatari hospitality.” The two examples the article discusses (the World Cup and Souq Waqif) clearly show Qatar’s “positionality” through the cultural practice of karam (generosity), but the guest must reciprocate and respect the host’s culture.
Mahmoud Abdelhamid Mahmoud Ahmed Khalifa’s article “Amphibious Storytellers in Leo Africanus and The Moor’s Account: Exiles and Nomads as bicultural Humanists” discusses the way in which Laila Lalami’s The Moore’s Account and Amin Maalouf’s Leo Africanus each fictionalizes a historical figure, Mustafa Al-Zammouri and Alhassan Alwazzan, respectively, to counter orientalist narratives about the other. They do so by breaking the figures’ silence to narrate a discourse of “bicultural humanism” void of “jingoistic nationalism” rampant in Western orientalist traditions. The two fictionalized figures spoke truth to power in their discourse and actions.
Muna Abd-Rabbo, Ghadir Zalloum, and Ziad Nemrawi’s article “Decolonizing Imperialist Discourse in Jane Austen’s Persuasion: A Saidian Perspective” extends Edward Said’s critique of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to her other novel, Persuasion to show the absence of the colonized and their “terrain” while the British Empire is being glorified.