The Kanafani Effect

Abstract

Guided by Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal studies on ‘resistance literature’, this paper extends the concept to contemporary Palestinian fiction film to explore its permutations in the visual medium. The resistance label has had its repercussions on Palestinian cultural production; however, it continues to inspire an aesthetically-driven innovative defiance in the face of an ongoing Israeli occupation. Tracing the divorce of cultural production from political organizations, I focus on a Palestine configuring ‘inside’, attending to the films of Michel Khleifi and Elia Suleiman, to explore therein a particular synthesis of counter-narratives of resistance. Embedded in the moving image medium itself, in its structures, techniques and narrative forms, the aesthetic resistance Kanafani had anticipated shines through these artists’ films to disclose new spaces of everyday resistance, in expressions of freedom, satire, self-criticism and humor. The spectator is called on to partake in creating these spaces, by reading silences and interpreting multilayered images so as to construct meanings that cannot be hijacked by language or confined by oppression.