FOCUS AND SCOPE
Diwan: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra Arab is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the critical study of Arabic language and literature. Diwan reads language and literature as the medium through which power is exercised, identity is constructed, and resistance against oppression finds voice. These dynamics unfold at once in pressing global phenomena and in local intellectual and cultural traditions, and Diwan is equally attentive to both registers of inquiry. The merit of a submission is determined by the substantive and theoretical strength of its argument concerning power, identity, or resistance as these are enacted through Arabic language and literature. Diwan welcomes rigorous qualitative or quantitative methods capable of addressing this question, provided the contribution situates itself clearly within one or more of the three thematic gateways outlined below.
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, as vehicles for marginalised voices, or as 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.
