EDITORIAL FOREWORD

ABSTRACT

MENA MIGRANTS AND DIASPORAS IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MEDIA The first two decades of the twenty-first century put the 1990s accounts of globalization, multiculturalism, clash of civilizations, and transnational mobility of peoples and ideas through the rigorous tests of the 9/11 attacks and the global war on terror, the information revolution, the Arab uprisings, the "migration crisis," and the COVID-19 pandemic. The contributions in this special issue deal with various media produced in the first two decades of the twenty-first century social media videos, newspapers, films, poetry, fictional and nonfictional writing, performance, visual art, and graphic novels. [...]the special issue features six critical interventions in their respective areas of inquiry. Additionally, the essay accentuates the importance of the "cultural" in addition to the economic, social, and political layers that have received much of the attention of contemporary scholarship examining South Asian labor in the GCC.2 Dakkak situates these comedic videos within a disruptive sociopolitical milieu that may readily seem to engage the kafeel (sponsor) image as the site for the laborers' experiences with hardship but simultaneously draws attention to the subtlety of these engagements in critiquing state-level institutionalization of antiimmigrant (mis)treatment. Changing the narration from a focus on Turkish chivalry to a focus on Turkish governance, the authors argue, was associated with the changing nature of the Turkish government's restrictions on the newspaper as a venue for the opposition.