From the Editors:

Fall 2025 (Vol. XXXIII No.1-2)
​
[Return to issue information]

In this issue, we are proud to publish a diverse collection of peer-reviewed articles that represent
new directions in the critical interdisciplinary study of the Middle East and North Africa. In her
article, “Writing Africa for Africans: Du Bois, Egyptian Africanists, and the Encyclopedia
Africana Project Between Dreams and Disruptions,” May Kosba traces the historical evolution
of W. E. B. Du Bois’s vision for a pan-African encyclopedia through his and his family’s
interactions with Egyptian Africanists. She contrasts Du Bois’s own evolving vision for this
project with that of Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who claimed Du Bois’s
legacy for their encyclopedia project decades later. In her article, “Crime and Dystopia in Three
Egyptian Novels: Dissecting Cityscapes and the Body as a Terrain for Political Critique,” Dalia
Said Mostafa situates recent Egyptian dystopian crime fiction in its postrevolutionary political
context. Examining recent works by Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq, Basma ‘Abdel ‘Aziz, and Nael
Eltoukhy, Mostafa evokes how each author explores the bodily experience of dystopic
oppression as a means to grapple with a counterrevolutionary present.


The final two articles provide powerful ethnographic and political-economic studies of
agricultural labor in the occupied West Bank. They are products of two workshops on critical
labor studies in the Middle East and North Africa convened by Rima Majed at the American
University of Beirut in 2022. We are grateful to Rima Majed and Elizabeth Saleh for
coordinating these submissions and providing significant editorial insight towards their
completion. In “Tobacco Cultivation in the West Bank Between Economic Survival and Settler-
Colonial Constraints,” Kholoud Al-Ajarma, D. A. Jaber, and Jawida Mansour explore how
Palestinian tobacco workers negotiate Israeli settler colonialism’s effects at each stage of
production, from cultivation to manufacturing, shipping, and marketing. Highlighting women’s
centrality to this commodity chain, the authors provide trenchant insights into the overlapping
power structures that make the tobacco trade a vital lifeline that sustains Palestinian farming
communities. Fairouz Salem studies the agricultural system of the occupied West Bank through
the case study of Furush Beit Dajan in her contribution, “Palestinian Farmers’ Resilience Against
the Settler Colonial-Capitalist Production of Vulnerability in the Jordan Valley.” In
contradistinction to international institutions’ conception of vulnerability as a product of a finite
and specific risks, Salem identifies the settler-colonial and capitalist structures that consistently
generate vulnerability and inform Palestinians’ tactics for resilience.


This issue also features an urgently relevant essays section produced by the Middle East Studies
Association (MESA) Global Academy. Founded in 2019, the MESA Global Academy supports
scholars from the MENA who face persecution in their home countries. In conjunction with the
Graduate Center, City University of New York, the MESA Global Academy awards competitive 
scholarships to enable researchers to contribute to interdisciplinary knowledge production
projects at North American universities. Diana B. Greenwald introduces the essays, which Ceren
Abi and the MESA Global Academy Committee coordinated. The two contributors, Dina Hadad
and Nadia Al-Sakkaf, grapple with the present period of spectacular and devastating
transformation in the MENA. Both ground our understanding of profound geopolitical shifts in
Middle Eastern communities’ concrete experiences of warfare and fractured governance. The
issue concludes with a reviews section that explores a multidisciplinary selection of recent works
on political ecology, commodity history, popular culture, and resistance.