Ghassān Kanafānī’s Children: Agency and Contingency

Abstract

One of the major premises of Arab (post)colonial modernity is that the child could be a key bearer of change for a better future for the society. For the child to be successful as a bearer of change, she must first be transformed into a modern subject. In this article, I present the Palestinian case to explore this premise, examining the nature of the child as a modern subject with a particular type of agency. Specifically, I will focus on how Ghassān Kanafānī’s literary works represent the child as a sociopolitical agent. I analyze several literary genres, including dedications, letters, short stories, and novels. The article concludes by suggesting that this particular agency is a hybrid of child-adult agency, bounded by intergenerational succession in the context of patriarchal-colonial Palestine of the post-Nakbah era.