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While feminists in the West have identified in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cause for serious attention, this has not been the case among Arab feminists. This may be due to a lack of familiarity with their work or a lack of access to their works in translation, but I believe it has more to do with a perceived lack of resonance between Deleuze’s thought and Arab feminist concerns. The first part of this essay examines the state of Arab feminisms today, identifying four main tendencies: Islamic, rights based, Foucauldian, and conservative (the latter specific to feminism in the Persian Gulf states). The second section explores just how viable and productive a disjunctive synthesis of Deleuze and Arab feminism might be at this juncture. Deleuze and Guattari formulate disjunction as the production of differences. A relationship of disjunction can produce alternative ways of perceiving, feeling, and thinking about the world. I contend that a number of Deleuzian’s insights—including his Spinozist conception of the body in terms of its affective capacities; his notions of active and passive affects, adequate and inadequate ideas, and images of thought; as 14 well as his understanding of ethology—can open up unexpected and useful feminist modalities otherwise absent or restricted by the exigencies of an Arabo-Islamic milieu. In the third and final section, I briefly outline what effects such a project can have by analyzing the particular situation of women in the Gulf state of Kuwait through the lens of a recent political incident.

Post-reading queries tend to focus on women's lack of rights in the Arab region, religious fundamentalism, living under dictatorships, censorship and freedom of expression, and the implications of various regional wars rather than on questions about literary aesthetics. [...]the Arab world is viewed as a place of politics and nothing but.

This paper explores the effects of the Iraqi invasion on the Palestinian community in Kuwait. Specifically, it considers Gilles Deleuze's notion of the 'missing people' in relation both to the Palestinians deported after the 1991 Gulf War and to the majority of Kuwaitis who have not acknowledged the effects of this disappearance on either the Palestinians or themselves. The first section revisits the circumstances surrounding the deportation of approximately 380,000 Palestinians from Kuwait, while the second considers what was lost as a result. The final section proposes an 'ethics of the missing' as a possible means to engage and transform some of the ensuing problems.

The trope of Kuwait runs through numerous stories by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, including his well-known novella, Men in the Sun . Using Deleuze's clinical methodology, this paper maps Kanafani's Kuwait stories symptomatically to determine what the legacy of the Kanafani effect might be for contemporary Kuwait. It considers what his textual conjunction of affects and percepts did at the time and whether they can do anything now. Kanafani's position as a seminal figure within Palestinian national and resistance literature is well-recognised; however, his specific location in Kuwait at a key period of its development is generally overlooked. His clinical diagnosis of the relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in the 1940s and 1950s can provoke a reconsideration of that early period, especially relevant in light of post-1991 events. In addition to his writing, his actual presence in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s expresses an early promise of Kuwait as an open and cosmopolitan place soon betrayed and today mostly forgotten.

Al-Nakib explores the notion of ekphrasis, the expression of one form of artistic representation in terms of another form, in relation to the work of Algerian writer Assia Djebar. It is asserted that Djebar uses ekphrastic features as a way of negotiating the confusing conceptual territory where French and native Algerian cultures meet.