Papers by Dr. Hamzeh A Al-Jarrah
The international journal of literary humanities, 2024
Abstract: This article scrutinizes the existential void in Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Endi... more Abstract: This article scrutinizes the existential void in Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016). It utilizes existentialism as its theoretical basis in analyzing the novel, with special references to such philosophers as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. The whole novel lends itself to the existential void through a sense of anxiety, estrangement, and uncertainty. This leaves the narrator in a psycho-existential state of negation, which characterizes her relationship with the surrounding world. She cannot confirm the existence of things, and she is not sure, nor is the reader, whether things happened, are happening, or even will happen. The fictionality of the form of the novel imbues the fictional reality of the narrator’s life, which negates the very basis on which it is built, embodying the existential notion of void. It is an embodiment of its own existence. That is, its existence is determined by its negation. The narrator’s existence and the events narrated become mere possibilities. Her bemused consciousness puts her in a state of existential emptiness. This emptiness triggers the desire to escape Being. It results in the possibility of self-destruction by committing suicide by the end of the novel, as suicide seems to the narrator to be more authentic than being deluded by an aimless quest for finding meaning in a fragmentary life. Keywords: Anxiety, Iain Reid, Void, Nothingness, I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Journal Article, 2024
Abstract: This article scrutinizes the existential void in Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Endi... more Abstract: This article scrutinizes the existential void in Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016). It utilizes existentialism as its theoretical basis in analyzing the novel, with special references to such
philosophers as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. The whole novel lends itself to the existential void through a sense of anxiety, estrangement, and uncertainty. This leaves the narrator in a psycho-existential state of negation, which characterizes her relationship with the surrounding world. She cannot confirm the existence of things, and she is not sure, nor is the reader, whether things happened, are happening, or even will happen. The fictionality of the form of the novel imbues the fictional reality of the narrator’s life, which negates the very basis on which it is built, embodying the existential notion of void. It is an embodiment of its own existence. That is, its existence is determined by its negation. The narrator’s existence and the events narrated become mere possibilities. Her bemused consciousness puts her in a state of existential
emptiness. This emptiness triggers the desire to escape Being. It results in the possibility of self-destruction by committing suicide by the end of the novel, as suicide seems to the narrator to be more authentic than
being deluded by an aimless quest for finding meaning in a fragmentary life.
Keywords: Anxiety, Iain Reid, Void, Nothingness, I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Journal Article, 2024
This article analyzes the Presence-Absence dialectics in Athol Fugard's Blood Knot (1961). This d... more This article analyzes the Presence-Absence dialectics in Athol Fugard's Blood Knot (1961). This dialectics is rooted in the racist premise which considers blackness as a hole in being. The two brothers, Zachariah and Morris, fall into this dialectics from the outset of the play and, therefore, are trapped in sado-masochistic interplay. As they start corresponding with a white girl, Ethel, in search of Zachariah's sexual gratification, their hole in being is revealed in front of Ethel's symbolic presence, along with her brother's symbolic presence as a white cop. As a result, the black body recedes into its fixed racialized facticity that intensifies the sado-masochistic relationship between the two brothers. The play articulates an ontological examination of the black body in an antiblack world through the convergence of race and gender. I am engaged in an existential-phenomenological approach to dissect the ways in which the black body oscillates between Presence and Absence.
Information Sciences Letters
The evolution of Aphra Behn's political views is a point of scholarly contention. The analysis of... more The evolution of Aphra Behn's political views is a point of scholarly contention. The analysis of her dramatic works starts with her early tragicomedies, like The Young King and The Amorous Prince, and continues through her wellknown Exclusion Crisis's sexual comedies, like The Roundheads and Sir Patient Fancy. This paper argues that Behn's onstage royalism was considerably diverse, reflecting various degrees of support for the monarchy. Behn altered her political positions in response to the development of the fierce rivalry between different political parties. Following her concerns and discontent about the king's ability to rule the country in her early plays, Behn developed a remarkable tendency for supporting Charles II and created an image of an impeccable king beyond any criticism. The results suggest that Behn's Toryism did not reflect an unwavering and unchanging support for the newly restored monarchy, as was assumed previously.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE AND EDUCATION RESEARCH STUDIES
Adopting the perspective of critical race theory grounded in Black Existentialism, this article a... more Adopting the perspective of critical race theory grounded in Black Existentialism, this article argues that we should consider Black Drama beyond conventional conceptions of author, identity, or content, expanding the category to consider abject human life and misery beyond the color line as exemplified by Kennedy’s ‘Funnyhouse of a Negro’ (1964) and Genet’s ‘The Maids’ (1948). The paper argues that both texts dramatize an existential conception of Blackness through the construction of essentialized otherness. The two plays present otherness as constructible rather than biological. By doing so, Kennedy and Genet contest the authenticity of the racial construction of identity. Consequently, Sarah’s experience of absorbing the symbols of power in Funny House speaks to the existential experience that Claire and Solange undertake in The Maids as “Black” human beings. The paper shows that the Blackness portrayed in the works of Kennedy and Genet is a “trapped identity” which results from...
Journal Article , 2022
Adopting the perspective of critical race theory grounded in Black Existentialism, this article a... more Adopting the perspective of critical race theory grounded in Black Existentialism, this article argues that we should consider Black Drama beyond conventional conceptions of author, identity, or content, expanding the category to consider abject human life and misery beyond the color line as exemplified by Kennedy’s ‘Funnyhouse of a Negro’ (1964) and Genet’s ‘The Maids’ (1948). The paper argues that both texts dramatize
an existential conception of Blackness through the construction of essentialized otherness. The two plays present otherness as constructible rather than biological. By doing so, Kennedy and Genet contest the
authenticity of the racial construction of identity. Consequently, Sarah’s experience of absorbing the symbols of power in Funny House speaks to the existential experience that Claire and Solange undertake in The Maids
as “Black” human beings. The paper shows that the Blackness portrayed in the works of Kennedy and Genet is a “trapped identity” which results from being entangled between two opposed ontological poles: being and
non-being. Therefore, the failure of establishing balance between human agency and their new existential situation leads to an inauthentic identity and a false mode of existence. Oscillating between Blackness and
whiteness results in fragmented selves, embodying the existential notion of no exit, but is the liberator that is necessary for the Black Existentialism.
The evolution of Aphra Behn's political views is a point of scholarly contention. The analysis of... more The evolution of Aphra Behn's political views is a point of scholarly contention. The analysis of her dramatic works starts with her early tragicomedies, like The Young King and The Amorous Prince, and continues through her wellknown Exclusion Crisis's sexual comedies, like The Roundheads and Sir Patient Fancy. This paper argues that Behn's onstage royalism was considerably diverse, reflecting various degrees of support for the monarchy. Behn altered her political positions in response to the development of the fierce rivalry between different political parties. Following her concerns and discontent about the king's ability to rule the country in her early plays, Behn developed a remarkable tendency for supporting Charles II and created an image of an impeccable king beyond any criticism. The results suggest that Behn's Toryism did not reflect an unwavering and unchanging support for the newly restored monarchy, as was assumed previously.
Millennium Journal of English Literature, Linguistics and Translation
This article argues that Ed Bullins’s play In the Wine Time (1968) presents collective existentia... more This article argues that Ed Bullins’s play In the Wine Time (1968) presents collective existential black consciousness. The play showcases a collective struggle against the oppressive reality through depicting a realistic image of the depressing life of the blacks in the black ghetto. This stems from the idea that Black existential philosophy and Black existential drama present a collective notion of existence rather than the individualistic notion of existence presented by traditional, European existentialism. Bullins builds this notion among his characters throughout the scenes of the play. To this end, the play characterizes a dialogue between the individualistic level of existence and the collective one through calling on for improving the oppressive reality through choice and opportunity. The collective struggle the play shows throughout the performance intends to free the black individual, as freeing the black individual is the first step toward achieving the collective freedo...
Millennium Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
This article aims at showing how Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon's play Woza Albert (1981) presents identi... more This article aims at showing how Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon's play Woza Albert (1981) presents identity as performative, not fixed and static. I argue that the play helps deconstruct the idea that identity is given. As the contact with oppression generates different reactions and, therefore, different possibilities and multiple layers of identity, this play offers new alternatives for understanding Black identity rather than racialized categories of black and white. These alternatives are achieved through dramatic actions as well as through the existential transformational moments that take place throughout the performance. The play emphasizes the idea that there is a possibility for the Black identity to exist beyond racist categories through highlighting the importance of being human and achieving oneself. Therefore, the play profoundly presents socio-political and racialexistential dimensions that help concretize and universalize Black identity.
Journal Article, 2022
Drawing on reader-response criticism, this article aims at analyzing the aesthetic receptive expe... more Drawing on reader-response criticism, this article aims at analyzing the aesthetic receptive experience of teaching imagery through painting/drawing. We argue that such an approach helps students transcend the limitations of written words by deconstructing the text and reconstructing the meaning, which, in turn, enriches students' creativity, free-thinking, and ability to describe sensory experiences. Our approach, in this case, is a medium of meta-reflection through which students undergo the aesthetic experience while painting/drawing mediates between the text and students' unconscious mind. The role of reader-response through painting/drawing is to unravel the relational structures that mark this creative process. To this end, we applied this method to an undergraduate class of poetry at Taibah University, Saudi Arabia. The sample consisted of forty-four undergraduate students, who were asked to represent Robert Frost's poem, "After Apple-Picking," in painting/drawing. To analyze the students' act of reading, the participants were asked to write reflection letters on how they felt throughout the process of preparing their portraits and, consequently, their replies were used in analyzing their portraits. The study presents a replicable model for application to other genres and literary texts.
This article analyzes Adrienne Kennedy’s play The Owl Answers (1965) from a Black Existential-fem... more This article analyzes Adrienne Kennedy’s play The Owl Answers (1965) from a Black Existential-feminist perspective. It dissects the black female protagonist’s identity as a trapped identity. In addition, the article unravels the detrimental impacts of oppression and racism on the African-American female protagonist in the play in her attempt to construct a clear concept of her identity. Consequently, one of the significant issues that this article responds to is how Kennedy’s protagonists question the concept of Blackness established by radical black male thinkers. I argue that The Owl Answers presents an existential crisis of achieving one’s authentic identity and a true self. Clara, the female protagonist, strives to achieve an identity of her choice. As a female character and as a black individual, we see her entangled in racist situations from which she finds no exit.
Journal Article, 2020
This article argues that Ed Bullins"s play In the Wine Time (1968) presents collective existentia... more This article argues that Ed Bullins"s play In the Wine Time (1968) presents collective existential black consciousness. The play showcases a collective struggle against the oppressive reality through depicting a realistic image of the depressing life of the blacks in the black ghetto. This stems from the idea that Black existential philosophy and Black existential drama present a collective notion of existence rather than the individualistic notion of existence presented by traditional, European existentialism. Bullins builds this notion among his characters throughout the scenes of the play. To this end, the play characterizes a dialogue between the individualistic level of existence and the collective one through calling on for improving the oppressive reality through choice and opportunity. The collective struggle the play shows throughout the performance intends to free the black individual, as freeing the black individual is the first step toward achieving the collective freedom.
Journal Article , 2020
Drawing on postcolonial theory and adopting the perspective of critical race theory, this article... more Drawing on postcolonial theory and adopting the perspective of critical race theory, this article argues that Lillian Horace's posthumously published novel Angie Brown (1949) depicts a transformative, dialectical anti-colonial discourse. This stems from the fact that Horace's people in this novel undergo an internal colonial experience. In addition, the novel strikingly demonstrates and resembles various aspects of anti-colonialism. To challenge internal colonialization, the novel presents two aspects of anti-colonial agency: negation and affirmation. Negation is used to destabilize the colonial racist subjectivity, and affirmation is employed to construct an alternative postcolonial subjectivity. In all of its breadth, Horace's transformative discourse is rendered through three phases: economic empowerment and independence, educational fulfilment and progress, and political participation and representation. My contention is that Horace's challenge to racism is part of a larger umbrella of challenging colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, I am driving at dialogic intersectionality of African American liberating thought and anticolonial discourse, as demonstrated by Horace's novel. As I am concerned throughout with analysing the institutionalized and systematized racist ideology implemented by white racist people to subjugate black Americans, I also scrutinize Horace's anti-colonial and anti-slavery discourse.
Journal Article, 2020
This article aims at showing how Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon's play Woza Albert (1981) presents identi... more This article aims at showing how Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon's play Woza Albert (1981) presents identity as performative, not fixed and static. I argue that the play helps deconstruct the idea that identity is given. As the contact with oppression generates different reactions and, therefore, different possibilities and multiple layers of identity, this play offers new alternatives for understanding Black identity rather than racialized categories of black and white. These alternatives are achieved through dramatic actions as well as through the existential transformational moments that take place throughout the performance. The play emphasizes the idea that there is a possibility for the Black identity to exist beyond racist categories through highlighting the importance of being human and achieving oneself. Therefore, the play profoundly presents socio-political and racial-existential dimensions that help concretize and universalize Black identity.
Look, a Negro! ... It was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but ... more Look, a Negro! ... It was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person ... I was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors" (Fanon, 1967, 84). Abstract: This article scrutinizes the drastic effects of the dehumanizing white gaze on the black individual's self from psycho-existential perspectives, mainly through the thoughts of the existential philosophers and thinkers Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Lewis R. Gordon. I argue that the white inferiorizing gaze makes the black-skinned individual estranged from his / her authentic self and, therefore, develop a fragmented self. This leads the black individual to internalize inferiority and to build what is called "false consciousness." These effects are analyzed in the African American playwright Susan-Lori Parks' play Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), specifically in the first and second parts of the play: Snails and Third Kingdom.
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Papers by Dr. Hamzeh A Al-Jarrah
philosophers as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. The whole novel lends itself to the existential void through a sense of anxiety, estrangement, and uncertainty. This leaves the narrator in a psycho-existential state of negation, which characterizes her relationship with the surrounding world. She cannot confirm the existence of things, and she is not sure, nor is the reader, whether things happened, are happening, or even will happen. The fictionality of the form of the novel imbues the fictional reality of the narrator’s life, which negates the very basis on which it is built, embodying the existential notion of void. It is an embodiment of its own existence. That is, its existence is determined by its negation. The narrator’s existence and the events narrated become mere possibilities. Her bemused consciousness puts her in a state of existential
emptiness. This emptiness triggers the desire to escape Being. It results in the possibility of self-destruction by committing suicide by the end of the novel, as suicide seems to the narrator to be more authentic than
being deluded by an aimless quest for finding meaning in a fragmentary life.
Keywords: Anxiety, Iain Reid, Void, Nothingness, I’m Thinking of Ending Things
an existential conception of Blackness through the construction of essentialized otherness. The two plays present otherness as constructible rather than biological. By doing so, Kennedy and Genet contest the
authenticity of the racial construction of identity. Consequently, Sarah’s experience of absorbing the symbols of power in Funny House speaks to the existential experience that Claire and Solange undertake in The Maids
as “Black” human beings. The paper shows that the Blackness portrayed in the works of Kennedy and Genet is a “trapped identity” which results from being entangled between two opposed ontological poles: being and
non-being. Therefore, the failure of establishing balance between human agency and their new existential situation leads to an inauthentic identity and a false mode of existence. Oscillating between Blackness and
whiteness results in fragmented selves, embodying the existential notion of no exit, but is the liberator that is necessary for the Black Existentialism.
philosophers as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. The whole novel lends itself to the existential void through a sense of anxiety, estrangement, and uncertainty. This leaves the narrator in a psycho-existential state of negation, which characterizes her relationship with the surrounding world. She cannot confirm the existence of things, and she is not sure, nor is the reader, whether things happened, are happening, or even will happen. The fictionality of the form of the novel imbues the fictional reality of the narrator’s life, which negates the very basis on which it is built, embodying the existential notion of void. It is an embodiment of its own existence. That is, its existence is determined by its negation. The narrator’s existence and the events narrated become mere possibilities. Her bemused consciousness puts her in a state of existential
emptiness. This emptiness triggers the desire to escape Being. It results in the possibility of self-destruction by committing suicide by the end of the novel, as suicide seems to the narrator to be more authentic than
being deluded by an aimless quest for finding meaning in a fragmentary life.
Keywords: Anxiety, Iain Reid, Void, Nothingness, I’m Thinking of Ending Things
an existential conception of Blackness through the construction of essentialized otherness. The two plays present otherness as constructible rather than biological. By doing so, Kennedy and Genet contest the
authenticity of the racial construction of identity. Consequently, Sarah’s experience of absorbing the symbols of power in Funny House speaks to the existential experience that Claire and Solange undertake in The Maids
as “Black” human beings. The paper shows that the Blackness portrayed in the works of Kennedy and Genet is a “trapped identity” which results from being entangled between two opposed ontological poles: being and
non-being. Therefore, the failure of establishing balance between human agency and their new existential situation leads to an inauthentic identity and a false mode of existence. Oscillating between Blackness and
whiteness results in fragmented selves, embodying the existential notion of no exit, but is the liberator that is necessary for the Black Existentialism.