Co-editors’ introduction

Abstract

The journal’s primary mission is to develop and expand networks of communication within and across relevant fields by publishing research that identifies the literatures and cultures of the Middle East not just as subjects of study, but as locations of knowledge with relevance beyond any one academic discipline or field of thought. In order to accomplish that radical goal we need the energetic participation of a large number of critical and creative thinkers, reviewers, and readers who are committed to establishing connections across geographies and time periods, forging theoretical languages grounded in the region’s epistemologies, and fostering a comparative literature beyond the main reference point of Euroamerica. We, in turn, are making an effort to reach new readers and authors, provide a forum for collaborative projects and special issues, and diversify our pool of peer reviewers. Despite the new vigor and diversity that we collectively bring to the journal, we continue to struggle to make room for the work and participation of scholars working outside of Europe and North America, especially those working in state-funded—or rather un-funded—institutions. A key challenge of the next phase in our journal’s history will be to address this decolonial challenge directly and to be frank about our failings and the structural reasons for them. In this, our first issue, we hope to demonstrate what this kind of work can look like. We are proud to be publishing three excellent and incisive articles by scholars whose research not only challenges existing paradigms, but pushes past them to suggest alternative vistas of analysis, comparison, and understanding. Two articles, “Eyes on the Prize: The Global Readability of an IPAF-Winning Modern Arabic Novel” by Anna Ziajka Stanton and “Orphanhood and Allegoresis in Radwā ʿĀshūr’s Thulāthiyyat Gharnātah” by M. J. Ernst, formulate new ways to think about the circulation of texts, literary aesthetics, and, in the case of the latter, experiences of imperial violence. Stanton puts forward alternative paradigms for thinking through translation and the circulation of texts between “center” and “periphery”, terms that have defined thinking about world literature over the past two decades. Ernst takes to task Frederic Jameson’s vision of Third-World literature as national allegory in the shadow of globalization, reading Radwā ʿĀshūr’s 1990s Thulāthiyyat Gharnātah (Granada Trilogy) as a “late capitalist allegory of the global South”, in which stories nestle within other stories as characters struggle to understand their place within a world of overlapping and