Dear Colleagues,

For this Special Issue of Humanities, contributions are invited on the theme of Race and Racism in Arabic literature. Submissions on poetry, drama, the novel, and other literary genres are all welcome. Preference will be given to approaches that emphasize intersections with colonialism, law, imperialism, feminism, or other modalities that help expand and nuance our understanding of the location of race and racism in collective Arab identities.

Africa, Blackness, and eastern slavery are enmeshed in the identity of the Arab world in ways that are seldom explicitly acknowledged, if not forcefully silenced. However, Arabic literature, both modern and pre-modern, is replete with works that share a complex and phobic fascination with Black subjectivities. This Special Issue aims to contribute to a much-needed and long-overdue revision of Arabic literary and cultural products and practices that engage Blackness and anti-Black racism.

The history of the Arabo-Islamic empire in Africa is long and convoluted, as is the literature it has produced. While many Arabic literary representations deal with Black subjects in racist, ahistorical, and apolitical terms, racialization also shifts and changes in subtle ways from period to period, and sometimes even in a single work as it moves from context to context, as in the chivalric legends of the black heroes of the sīra literature.

During its early episodes, depictions of Black-Arab hybridity served as a means of negotiating between the Arab and African groups that formed the basis of the Muslim armies. Later, the imperial Islamic history in Africa intersected with European colonial projects subcontracted to Arab and South-Asian middlemen to produce a different set of literary articulations of Blackness. With the passage of time and shared oppression, Arabs and Africans became embroiled in decolonial struggles and anti-capitalist ambitions that characterized the latter half of the twentieth century and its literary output. Despite this enduring exchange between Blackness and Arabness, and the persistent racialization that permeates this relationship, we seldom encounter explicit, rigorous assessment of this long geopolitical engagement, the chronic anti-Black racism, and the color politics that prevail across the Arab world today. On the other hand, racialized categorizations of Black individuals and communities crowd the margins of Arabic oral and written media, appearing in a wide array of Arabic literary genres, including poetry, drama, and the novel, from pre-Islamic times to the present.

This Special Issue will attend to the wide networks of production, circulation, engagement, and power dynamics at play in these works and in Arabic literature and culture at large to ask: 

• How is Blackness historically valorized, framed, dismissed, or erased in Arabic literary products?
• How does race “travel” between Africa and the Arab world in literary discourse?
• How is anti-Black racism historically and materially produced in Arabic discourse? What are its networks of legitimization and exchange? How do they morph over time?
• How does Arabic’s extensive literary geography intersect with racialized histories and material realities of colonized and enslaved societies?
• How is the Arab cultural sphere theorized and imagined according to a color hierarchy? What roles does this imagined scheme assign to Black subjects?
• How do racial ideologies influence the production, distribution, and critique of Arabic literature and culture as a field?
• How do religious institutions and secular criticism inflect debates over racialization and race politics in the Arab world?

Dr. Yasmeen Hanoosh
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Arabic literature, poetry, drama, novel
• Blackness, anti-Black racism
• Arab culture and Africa