Narrating the Ruins: Eco-Orientalism, Environmental Violence, and Postcolonial Ecologies in Arab Anglophone Fiction

Abstract The article asks how the current Arab Anglophone fiction re-works violence to the environment as a legacy of empire, war, and displacement thus challenging the mainstream ecological discourse of presenting Arab geographies as passive, degraded, or ecologically marginal. Through close readings of A History of Water in the Middle East by Sabrina Mahfouz (2019), American War by Omar El Akkad (2017), and Salt Houses by Hala Alyan (2017) , the study shows how these writers use poetic collage, speculative dystopia, and diasporic realism as an aesthetic strategy to make ecological loss appear as historical, gendered and politically stratified. Based on postcolonial ecocriticism, the slow violence, and criticism of eco-orientalism, the article argues that these texts are not only a representation of environmental crises but theorize them by means of embodied memory, affective disruption, and literary form.