PurposeEmployee work engagement has become a major concern for managers as hardly 21% of employees are engaged in their work. Therefore, this study aims to unveil the association between ethical leadership and employee engagement. Specifically, the study explores the mediating role of trust in leader between ethical leadership and employee work engagement and moderating role of harmonious work passion in the association between trust in leader and employee work engagement.Design/methodology/approachThis study collected data from 491 employees and their immediate supervisors working in various organizations (in Pakistan) through “Google Forms”. The data were analyzed through analysis of moment structure (AMOS) and structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to examine measurement model (for unidimensionality) and structural model (for hypotheses testing).FindingsThe study noted that ethical leaders positively influence their subordinates to engage in their work. In addition, employees' trust in leader was noted to mediate the association between ethical leadership and employee work engagement. Finally, employees high in harmonious work passion are more likely to engage in their work when perceived their leaders ethical style.Practical implicationsThe study suggests to management that fair dealing and involvement in decision-making (ethical leadership) improve employee work engagement as such practices build employees' level of trust in their leaders. In addition, management is suggested to give freedom to employees while selecting their tasks as it positively contributes to their harmonious work passion which ultimately benefits the organization.Originality/valueDrawing upon social exchange and self-determination theory, this study is the first of its kind that explored the moderating role of harmonious work passion and mediating role of trust in leader between ethical leadership and employee work engagement.

This paper theorizes the use of water imagery in Elizabeth Bishop’s selected postmodern poetry namely, “The Map”, “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “The Man-Moth”. Speaking in the language of tears, lake, bay, river, strait, sea and ocean, Bishop personifies water for culture and its language. It is on this basis that Bishop comes close to the French psychoanalyst and linguist, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora. Kristeva calls it a space of maternal discourse, where the fluid realm of mother’s body called chora celebrates the fluidity of semiotic desires and expresses them through the symbolic language of the world outside her body. Bishop revisits this bodily space, time and again,  to acquire subjectivity through the mother/child bond. Bishop’s poetic language celebrates this relationship between the semiotic (maternal) and symbolic (paternal) realm of language. The symbolic enables the semiotic to express itself, and the semiotic shatters the rigidity of the symbolic meanings through an ongoing process of signification. This reciprocity, through the semiotic chora, makes Bishop’s identity fluid and always in motion towards multiplicity. This plurality brings newness to Bishop’s poetry and engages the researcher with fresh perspectives of outer vision, inner perception, structural patterns and make her poetry eventful.

This research is an attempt to explore the formation of the assemblage of justice in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s The Song of Death (Ughniyat al- Mawt) (2008). The play is Al-Hakim’s rendition of a rural tragedy. Alwan, the son returning from the metropolis, remains caught up in a centuries’ long tribal blood feud. Urged on avenging his father’s murder, and failing to do so, Alwan dampens his mother’s thirst for blood with his own. This paper looks at the play with reference to K. M. Clarke’s merging of the affective theory with the fabric of justice. In this way, the portrayal of both tribal and new formations of systemic justice rising in Nasser’s Egypt will be explored within the play. Furthermore, this research investigates the role past traces and remnants of encounters with justice play in the structuring of justice within the rural scape of modern Egypt. The paper explores and dismantles various binaries presented in the text: tribal and modern, justice and vengeance, and shame and honour. It analyzes the ways in which emotional expressions and affects are articulated and institutionalized by the characters. In addition, the possibility of new imaginaries and cartographies of justice will be explored in order to reframe the debate around the binary of tribal and modern judicialization of violence.

This article expands on Elizabeth Bishop’s affinity with the Cuban poet and critic Severo Sarduy and his neo-baroque reading of the seventeenth-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler’s planetary geometry of the imperfect circle called the ellipse and its linguistic equivalent the ellipsis (Sarduy 293). This essay will elucidate the geometrical decentering of space and the linguistic decentering of meanings as characteristics of ellipse and ellipsis through a discussion of Bishop’s poems, “In the Waiting Room,” “The Bight” and “One Art.” I argue that Bishop’s engagement with ellips(e/is) is a spatial response to the destabilization of modern urban space and the gap between language and signification, akin to T.S. Eliot’s ideas about the gap between thought and feeling in modern sensibility. Through ellips(e/is), Bishop seeks a perspective outside definitive contours and finds beauty in an incomplete and distorted embodiment of an ever-becoming truth.

This paper examines the struggle of queer people through the perspective of the term Queer in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). This paper aims to explore the persistent struggle of queer minorities in Indian society, their challenges to the cultural traditions of heteronormative society and their modes of resistance. The paper mainly focuses on the protagonist of the early part of the novel, Anjum, formerly Aftab, who is one of the socially abandoned transgender characters of modern India. The purpose of this research is to explore the queer subversion against the heteronormative ideals in Roy's novel and to show through Anjum’s vision of queer resistance and utopia. In the novel, Anjum's choice of leaving her house and living in a queer utopia, fighting individually with the society throughout her life, establishing a small, but self-dependent community in the graveyard, and sheltering the minorities like “queers, addicts, orphans, Muslims and other dropouts from the society” (Zubair, 2018, p. 35), does not exhibit her defeat or helplessness, but her defiance and rebellion against the status quo. This act has also empowered her to redefine her life in the best possible way by creating an alternative Duniya where she could shelter “all people from different shades and shapes of life” (Raina, 2017, p. 837).