Just as past crises have occurred throughout history, our current era seems defined by itsown diverse conditions of adversity. From our perspective as students and scholars of the NearEast, hard times have become an uncritical staple of contemporary discourse regarding theMiddle East – the news often portrays the Middle East as a difficult place, defined by itshardships and catastrophes. In our call for papers, we emphasized that we were searching forresearch that complicates this narrative by considering it from a diverse array of criticalperspectives. The two papers published in our first re-issue, offer such perspectives.Rachel Winter’s contribution to this issue, “I Have a Story, Too: Suicide Bombers,Borders, & Peripheral Narratives” counterposes the narratives of suicide bombings constructedby the news media to those offered by the artists she examines. Winter diviersifies thisperspective further by looking into representations of female suicide bombers, and the differentgendered narratives that motivate thesir represntation in the media. She offers the archetypes thatpackage these suicide bombers, inflecting the Jungian archetypes with the mythical bent of the“Femle Monster” and “Woman Warrior.” What comes under scrutiny is not merely therepresentation of the suicide bomber by the artowrk, but also its framing. Winter asks, “What isthe viewer to make of the title, “Snow White”?” The fairytale is the framework around which thesuicide bomber can be made familiar to the audience and Winter’s paper puts pressure on thedesire to repackage the suicide bomber’s experience through a Western framework.1In his contribution, “Homebound Travelers: The Return's Destabilization of Homeland inArabic literature,” Shawheen Rezaei sheds light on the shattered perspective of “the return.” Inhis reading of the riḥ la Rezaei focuses on the way it disorients the traveler — both the characterand the reader. Rezaei’s article suggests that we consider how our perspective as readers issimilarly complicated in our reading of this genre. In the novels he examines, the question of thetraveler’s encounter with the other is nuanced both by the other that the traveler encountersabroad and the other that he encounters once he returns home. When the traveler returns as anoutsider, we are forced to question whether there can really be a return. Ultimately in askingwhat it means to return, the works that Rezaei readsforce us to consider if any return is possible.