Ghassan Kanafani in America: Radical Art in a Liberal Marketplace

• In Event: Minor Genres in Circulation: Cultural Flows and Friction in the Late American Empire

Abstract

Ghassan Kanafani was a radical Palestinian intellectual and writer who was assassinated by the Mossad in 1972 at the age of 36. He was the author of a number of essays and short stories, including the classic “Land of Sad Oranges,” as well as the novella Men in the Sun, first published in 1962. This paper will trace the American lives of Men in the Sun, focusing on its publication in English in 1978 by Three Continents Press. It explores the ways in which this book, one of the few novels by Palestinians made available to an English-speaking audience in the US before the rise of “world literature” in the 1990s, became an icon of “resistance literature.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Kanafani’s novella was Three Continents’ bestselling publication. A tiny press with liberal multiculturalist vision of bringing “Third World” stories to US readers, Three Continents was a crucial gateway for professors, activists, and members of the Middle East diaspora who saw cultural production and consumption as a site of political education. This paper explores the multiple tensions between Kanafani’s radical vision of Palestinian resistance, the emergent and politicized US audience for Palestinian literature, and the liberal vision of “three continents” promoted by the press.

Author

• Melani McAlister, George Washington University