Arab Studies Journal Announces Fall 2019 Issue: Editor’s Note and Table of Contents

We are proud to feature another collection of insightful articles that are theoretically rich and empirically grounded. In “Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel,” Lana Tatour draws on new archival findings of the 1948–52 period as Israel established its constitutional cornerstones. She situates Israel’s citizenship regime in a wider process of settler indigenization and native de-indigenization. Tatour shows how citizenship regimes are crucial to the colonization, dispossession, and domination of indigenous peoples. In this light, citizenship is not some failed unresolved promise, but a key mechanism for ethnic cleansing. Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed traces literary portrayals of the degradation of urban life in Morocco during the era of economic liberalization. His “Dispossession and Hybridity: The Neoliberal Moroccan City in Mohammed Achaari’s Literary Enterprise” reveals the Moroccan city in Mohammed Achaari’s novel, Al-Qaws wa-l-Farasha. He unravels the city as a scene of modern hybrid assemblages that bring the environmental, financial, and technological into violent association. Benny Nuriely makes use of new archival terrain to reveal how the Custodian of Absentee Property, the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and the Israeli Army used hunger to dispossess Palestinians in “The Hunger Economy, The Military Government in the Galilee, Ramle, and Lydda, 1948–1949.” In the Galilee, the army confiscated Palestinian lands and turned Palestinians into internal refugees. The Custodian took charge of land and mobile property in Ramle and Lydda. The ministry, in the meantime, transferred one thousand Palestinian workers from the Lower Galilee in the north to Ramle and Lydda in the central plain. Nuriely shows how the Military Government’s first year initiated a hunger economy to realize accumulation through dispossession. Iman Hamam traces two graphic novels’ depictions of the passageways, tunnels, and sewers that constitute Cairo’s underground spaces in “Over the Top and Underground: Graphic Visualizations of Space in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro and Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia.” She shows how these graphic representations teach us new lessons about neoliberalism in Egypt, while simultaneously subverting communication, transportation, and sewer networks to unsettle the spatial order. Nova Robinson critically engages graphic narratives of the Lebanese Civil War and highlights the politics of memory and reconciliation in the US classroom. In “Jerry Cans and Shrapnel Collections: Using Graphic Memoirs to Teach About the Lebanese Civil War,” Robinson provides scholars and teachers innovative pedagogical tools to improve visual literacy, nourish critical thinking, and add personal dimensions to courses on the history of the Middle East broadly, and Lebanon specifically. We are proud as always to feature a robust review section.