FOCUS AND SCOPE
Diwan: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra Arab publishes original research across the full spectrum of Arabic linguistics, literary studies, and translation, spanning classical and contemporary Arabic writing, oral and written, poetry and prose. Within this domain, Diwan particularly welcomes and gives priority to submissions that engage Arabic language and literature through one or more of the following critical lenses:
1. Power, Ideology, and Discursive Order across Arabic Language and Literature
This theme examines how Arabic language and literature construct, naturalise, or contest relations of power and ideology within the formation of discourse, whether political, religious, social, or cultural. Language, in this view, does not merely represent power that already exists; it operates as an active mechanism that organises discourse into a given order that produces and sustains ideology while disguising it as natural and inevitable.
2. Identity, Alterity, and the Sociocultural Imaginary within Arabic Language and Literature
This theme examines how Arabic language and literature construct, negotiate, or distort collective and individual identity across the dimensions of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and diasporic belonging. Identity, within this frame, is never given or stable; it is constituted relationally against the figure of the "other" and contested within the sociocultural imaginary before it attains full articulation.
3. Resistance, Subalternity, and the Politics of Voice through Arabic Language and Literature
This theme examines how Arabic language and literature function as instruments of resistance, vehicles for marginalised voices, or expressions of collective trauma under conditions of oppression. Subalternity here is not merely a question of who is silenced, but of the structures that determine which voices are deemed legitimate to be heard — rendering the very act of speaking a political act that contests who has the right to speak, and on whose behalf.
4. Transformation, Adaptation, and Linguistic-Cultural Change in Arabic Language and Literature
This theme examines how Arabic language and literature transform, adapt, or evolve as they encounter globalization, digitalization, and shifting epistemic hierarchies, including the enduring coloniality of language. Transformation, within this frame, is never a neutral adaptation to circumstance; it is a contested process in which established linguistic and cultural forms are preserved, negotiated, or reconstituted, and through which cultural identity itself is renegotiated in relation to emerging structures of knowledge and power.
Submissions situated outside these four priority areas remain eligible for review, provided they offer a clear interpretive, theoretical, or methodological contribution beyond descriptive classification (advancing an established framework, addressing a genuine gap in prior scholarship, or introducing a replicable analytical model). Purely descriptive accounts that neither engage a critical lens above nor articulate such a contribution fall outside the journal's editorial priorities.
