Special Issue Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN No. 1948-1853 ‘Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity’: Editorial, Ayman Abu-Shomar JPCS Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013 1 Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity; Editorial Ayman Abu-Shomar Assistant Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies King Saud University, Saudi Arabia Introduction The Special Issue Critical Spaces of Diaspora for Liquid Post-modernity provides a thinking- space of us invariably interested in the evolving spaces of Post-colonial and Cultural Studies. The theme signposts several avenues around diasporic literature aiming to address the contemporary stance of knowledge production within a broader sense of critical thought and epistemology. It also aims to address several sub themes regarding the current postmodernist stance and condition through branching out the theoretical scope of diaspora and literary studies. The papers included in this issue offer a capacious range for empirical and theoretical engagements with notions pertaining to what have become among the most contestable concepts of our times: post-modernity, post-coloniality, and liquidity (after Bauman, (2000)). Additionally, the literature of Diasporas, which has been an offshoot of diasporic experience, mounts up as the major source of empirical knowledge in this collection alongside with these theories and concepts. The assumption is that, for long, literature has been an integral part of post-colonial and diasporic experience which appears to be instrumental to our study of societies, cultures, historical momentum, and above all the critical discourses we sanctify to understand the human conditions. Since the human condition in this particular juncture of our history has become mystified by the momentum of dramatic changes in the social, cultural, political, and economical spheres, our ethical responsibility is to keep our search for new avenues of critical language at work to address the infinite assurgency of the moment. As Gur-Ze’ev, (2005) believes: there always exist other possibilities for new critical language and further potentials for approaching truth and richness of life, which are always matters for human concern. The theme, therefore, responds to such growing demands of ever-changing needs and to the insurgency and disintegration of obligations as well as to the emergence of new human conditions. Currently such conditions render normative and stable meanings and the ways to approach them problematic. It could be said that the current theme carries reflective bearings towards paradigmatic and essentialised epistemologies that are informed by cultural, political, and to a far extent, ideological outlooks. In other words, the way the authors in this collection engage with the diasporic text might be broadly understood as an attempt to take in hand a revisionary approach to the stance of knowledge production and meaning-making on contemporary times.