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Journal of Arabic Sciences and Humanities

Corresponding Author

Muhammad Khaled Alatrash

Authors ORCID

Muhammad Khaled Alatrash: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5585-3161

Article Type

Article

Keywords English

Promised Land, Arab American literature, Khalil Gibran, Laila Halaby, Affective citizenship

Abstract English

Scholarship on Arab American literature frequently follows a linear decline from Mahjar-era optimism to the disappointments of post-9/11. This article complicates that trajectory by reading Khalil Gibran's The Broken Wings (1912) and Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land (2007) as stages of a negative dialectic—contradiction held in tension without resolution. Gibran envisions America as a sanctuary unreached by the hands of the thieves, where the self might be understood correctly rather than sorted into hostile categories. Halaby reveals how sanctuary becomes a checkpoint: inclusion demands permanent performance of harmlessness, and failure is punished not through formal exclusion but through exhaustion. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (Bell), symbolic power (Bourdieu), and affect theory (Ahmed), the article argues that the 'Promised Land' functions as an affective contract, an implicit bargain in which recognition is offered conditionally and withdrawn under stress. It concludes by calling for infrastructures of belonging that extend ordinary ease to those not yet legible as safe.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.71422/1658-4058.1013

Accept Date

13 January 2026

Publication Date

4-25-2026

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