Caliban, the ‘enemy Other’ of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is a character that allows further investigations of the colonial ideology in its earliest forms; locating ‘evil’ forces outside the continent of Europe and the White race. Caliban, the only non-European character, is typified as the autocratic antagonist of the play whose evil intentions and actions cannot be redeemed. Against such representation, the essay argues that the villainous discourse attributed to Caliban is informed by Renaissance theological doctrines escorted by an emergent colonial ideology. It argues that, at a semantic level, the employment of the concept of ‘evil’ often serves as an intensifier to denounce wrongful actions. At a moral level, however the term is often contested on the basis that it involves unwarranted metaphysical commitments to dark spirits necessitating the presence of harmful supernatural creatures. To attribute the concept to human beings is therefore essentially problematic and dismissive since it lacks the explanatory power of why certain people commit villainous actions rather than others. Hence, the epistemological aporia of Caliban’s ‘evil’ myth reveals an inevitable paradox, which concurrently requires locating Caliban both as a human and unhuman figure. Drawing on a deconstructionist approach, the essay puts the concept of ‘evil’ under erasure, hence, argues that Caliban’s evilness is a mere production of rhetoric and discourse rather than a reality in itself. This review contributes to the intersecting areas of discourse, representations, and rhetoric of evil within the spectrum of postcolonial studies.

This article discusses how Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author's ability to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure.

Abstract:A critique of the prescribed Anglo-American canon for Jordanian Universities, this article utilises narrative protocols and storytelling juxtaposed against my own literary education and a former student of mine. It examines how lived experiences, identity contestations and reconciliations are reflected and reinforced in a dialogic exchange with the study of English literature at undergraduate, graduate levels as well as while teaching. In the 'New Times' of cyberspaces and the Internet accretion, the data used in this study is gathered through email and Facebook message exchange between a former student of mine and myself. After first introducing the English literary curriculum used in Jordanian universities, this article offers a critique of the canon pointing out that the study of English literature. As traditionally conceived in these universities, this tradition reinforces Eurocentrism, monolithic, elitism and particularly, and for the purpose of this article, in the ways it is disseminated, it signifies relations of power in the academy. It further shows how the subject-positions of students of English in this context are contested between repulsion, conformity, and when textual cultural representations are at stake, they pass through a process of an 'imbibing' construction of identity that reconciles warring sentiments of love and agony. The paper concludes by reminding literature educators that some students bring profound experiences of anguish and identity contestation with them to the literature classroom, and that it is therefore our responsibility to challenge the hegemonic and essentialised ideologies and practices informed by the adoption, perpetuation and dissemination of the literary canon in these educational contexts.

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