Category: Scholarship

“Treachery and Translation: The Allegiances of the Hebrew Language and Jewish Identity in Emile Habibi’s Palestine and al-Tahir Wattar’s Algeria,” Poetics Today, forthcoming.

In fraught settler-colonial contexts, cultural and linguistic encounters across ethnic, religious, and political battle-lines can often be construed as betrayals of the nationalist struggle. To the Arabs of Palestine after 1967 and Algeria after independence in 1962, the Hebrew language (and the Jewish communities it represented) increasingly became a source of suspicion through its association with French and Israeli colonial power. In this article, I analyze two Arabic novels published in 1974—Emile Habibyi’s The Pessoptimist and al-Tahir Wattar’s The Earthquake—whose contents, contexts, and afterlives contend with themes of treachery and fidelity, both linguistic and political. The Arab protagonists of both novels are lifelong traitors who collaborated with the French or Zionist occupiers, and their relationships to the Hebrew language and Jewish identity are mediated by proximity to occupation. Likewise, the authors, Habiby and Wattar, were preoccupied with betrayal their entire careers—either being accused of it themselves, or accusing it of others—because of the struggle over language and political power in the settler-colony. By analyzing treachery in the lives and literatures of these authors, I show how Jewish identity becomes a “third variable” in a binary settler-colonial struggle, rendering various forms of translation, solidarity, and hybridity across Arab and Jewish publics untenable.

“Fantasies of White Genocide: Conspiracy Theory, Reproductive Anxiety, and Self-Help in the Online Manosphere.” Journal of Medical Humanities, (2025): 1–22. Link.

The Great Replacement is a far-right conspiracy theory that warns of a global scheme against the “White race”—one that seeks to replace “native” white populations in Europe with migrant populations from the Third World. This theory has gained traction among white nationalist movements across Europe and America and has been referenced by several far-right terrorists in the last decade, but in recent years, elements of the theory have entered the right-wing and center-right mainstream media. My article excavates the intersections between the Great Replacement Theory and genres of masculinist self-help that have grown popular across male-dominated digital communities (also known as “the manosphere”) through influencers such as Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, and Marcus Follin, who hold diverse positions along the right-wing political spectrum. Using these as case studies, I trace the connections between demographic anxieties around migration and cultural anxieties around Western women’s fertility, and I argue that reproduction serves as the greatest limit case to the manosphere’s self-help genre. Women’s increasing control over reproduction challenges these influencers’ investment in self-help and control over their actualization of the masculine gender ideal, which in turn generates high levels of reproductive anxiety and leads to subsuming reproduction under the umbrella of men’s concerns. Overlaps between ideas of racial replacement and projects that seek to conserve manhood, sperm count, and testosterone, such as no-fap, no-porn, body building, and nutritional supplements, likewise serve to repackage white nationalism itself as a genre of masculine self-help and self-betterment.

“Dystopian Technologies in the Science Fiction of Palestine+100 and Iraq+100.” In Global Science Fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl, McFarland Publishers, (2025): 147–156.

Excerpt: The relationship that this genre [of Arabic science fiction] has to modern technological progress, and what that progress and advancement can achieve in the Arab world, is fraught: authors are estranged both from their particular conditions in the nations they describe and from the paradigmatic aspirations of the modern Western project, which promises prosperity and power to those who become most efficient at resource-extraction, runaway capitalism, and the development of high-tech. Questioning the modern project and its broken promises for the postcolonial future are, in my view, more central to the sub-genre than retrospective reflections on historical Arab advancement that has grown stagnant and superstitious. […] Technology in this Arabic sub-genre is almost uniformly dystopian in its objectives and outcomes, refining and exacerbating the oppression that inhabitants already face at the hands of colonial and neo-colonial ‘progress.’ In short, the deployment of the novum in Arabic science fiction tends to combine technological newness with societal sameness.

“‘Cauldron of Conspiracy’: Conspiratorial Tropes as Modes of Critique in Ḥabībī’s The Pessoptimist and Saʿadāwī’s Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Journal of Arabic Literature 55, no. 1 (2024): 401–27. Link.

This article uses the concepts of “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory,” along with their literary tropes, to theorize resistance to the colonial ideals of modernity in Israel and Iraq and to contest the oppressive developmental temporalities associated with this modernity. By analyzing Imīl Ḥabībī’s al-Mutashāʾil (The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, 1974) and Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013), I show how tropes of conspiracism and conspiratorial thinking are deployed in both of these novels to critique myths of linear progress—often used to justify the Israeli occupation and the U.S. invasion—despite the divergent historical periods and contexts out of which the two texts emerge. In their act of contestation, the novels leverage alternate temporalities in connection to conspiracism, such as the cyclical time of suffering and exploitation, or the apocalyptic time that offers release from said suffering through ending time altogether. Yet in both cases the tropes of conspiracy are ultimately shown to have little explanatory or emancipatory value and high human cost. Both novels thus thematize the analytic and critical limits of conspiracism.