![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafani (d. 1972) was deeply immersed in theorizing, lecturing, and publishing on Palestinian resistance literature from Beirut. A refugee of the 1948 war, Kanafani presented his theory of resistance literature and the notion of “cultural siege” at the March 1967 Beirut conference of the Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA). Articulated in resistance to Zionist propaganda literature and in solidarity with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary struggles in the Third World, Kanafani was inspired by Maxim Gorky, William Faulkner, and Mao Zedong alike. In books, essays, and lectures, Kanafani argued that Zionist propaganda literature served as a “weapon” in the war against Palestine, returning repeatedly to Arthur Koestler’s 1946 Thieves in the Night. Better known for his critique of Stalinism in Darkness at Noon (1940), Koestler was also actively involved in waging cultural Cold War, writing the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Congress for Cultural Freedom 1950 manifesto and helping the organization infiltrate Afro-Asian writing in the wake of Bandung. Kanafani’s 1960s theory of resistance literature thus responded at once to the psychological dislocation of Zionist propaganda fiction and the cultural infiltration of Arabic literature in the Cold War.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was generously supported by Bard College and a postdoctoral fellowship of the Europe in the Middle East/Middle East in Europe (EUME) program at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. The article could not have been written without the help of archivists at the Institute for Palestine Studies (Beirut) and at the University of Chicago’s Special Collections archive of the International Association for Cultural Freedom.
Notes
1 Ghassan Kanafani, “Study from Palestine: Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine,” Afro-Asian Writings 1, no. 2–3 (1968), pp. 65–79, quote on p. 66.
2 This phrase is from Ghassan Kanafani, Fi al-adab al-sahyuni (1967; repr., Beirut: Mu’assasat al-abhath al-‘arabiyya, 1987), p. 11; the language of weaponry occurs throughout Kanafani’s essays and books on what he calls adab al-muqawama (resistance literature) or al-adab al-muqawim (resisting literature, that is, literature in an active state of resistance). All translations from the Arabic, unless otherwise noted, are the author’s.
3 Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, “The Cultural Cold War in the Middle East: William Faulkner and the Franklin Book Programs,” Translation and Interpreting Studies 15, no. 3 (1 October 2020): pp. 433–5. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20076.had.
4 Ghassan Kanafani, “Study from Palestine,” p. 66. Bashir Abu Manneh registers the ensuing geographical split in the Palestinian poetic terrain, where resistance poets in occupied Palestine are cut off from modernist poets influenced by U.S. cultural infiltration projects: “The 48 Palestinian remnant missed the boat of poetic experimentation and free verse that was all the rage in Beirut and Baghdad (as practiced by Palestinian exiles Jabra and Tawfiq Sayigh).” See Bashir Abu Manneh, The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 76.
5 This article is part of a larger project comprising my forthcoming book, Imperious Plots: Cultural Infiltration and Arabic Literature in the Cold War. On the CCF in Beirut, see Holt, “‘Bread or Freedom’: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Hiwar (1962–67),” Journal of Arabic Literature 44, no. 1 (2013): http://www.jstor.org/stable/43304750; “Cold War in the Arabic Press: Hiwar (Beirut, 1962–67) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War, ed. Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte A. Lerg (New York: Palgrave, 2017); and “Cairo and the Cultural Cold War for Afro-Asia,” in Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, et. al. (New York: Routledge, 2018); Robyn Creswell, Beirut, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Anis Sayigh, Anis Sayigh ‘an Anis Sayigh (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes, 2006); Mudhakkirat Tawfiq Sayigh bi-khatt yaddihi wa-huwa yasta’idd l-isdar majallat Hiwar: 7 Nisan–31 Tammuz 1962, Beirut - London - Baris - Beirut [Memoirs of Tawfiq Sayigh in his own handwriting as he was preparing to publish the journal Hiwar: 7 April–31 July 1962, Beirut-London-Paris-Beirut], ed. Mahmoud Shurayh (Beirut: Dar Nelson, 2011); Issa J. Boullata, “The Beleaguered Unicorn: A Study of Tawfìq Sayigh,” Journal of Arabic Literature 4, no. 1 (1973), pp. 69–93 (especially the first five pages): https://doi.org/10.1163/157006473X00052. The Beirut scene of these years, culminating in Kanafani’s assassination, is captured in Rashid Khalidi’s most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020).
6 See Reem Abou-El-Fadl, “Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity and the 1957 Cairo Conference,” in “Other Bandungs,” special issue, Journal of World History 30, no. 1–2 (June 2019): pp. 157–192, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2019.0016.
7 See Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (Quebec: McGill-Queens Press, 2020).
8 On “(non)alignment” and the AAWA, see Leah Feldman, “Global Souths: Toward a Materialist Poetics of Alignment,” Boundary 2 47, no. 2 (2020): p. 204, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-8193326. See also, Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): pp. 176–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4355317; and Cyrus Schayegh, “Switch-Cities, Decolonization, and Globalization: Singapore, Beirut, Dakar,” Afro-Asian Visions, 10 August 2017, https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/switch-cities-decolonization-and-globalization-singapore-beirut-dakar-f913b2101599.
9 See the document appendices to the first issue of Afro-Asian Writings on the Afro-Asian Writers Association. I am relying on the Arabic version: “Mithaq: Rabitat al-kuttab al-afriqiyyin al-asiyawiyyin,” Al-adab al-afriqi al-asiyawi 1, no. 1 (March 1968): p. 149. On the history of the AAWA, Afro-Asian Writings and Lotus, see Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): pp. 565–67, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-1891570; and Djagalov, From Internationalism.
10 Lowell H. Schwartz, Todd C. Helmus, Dalia Dassa Kaye, et al., Barriers to the Broad Dissemination of Creative Works in the Arab World (Pittsburgh, PA: Rand Corporation, 2009). See also Lowell H. Schwartz, Political Warfare Against the Kremlin: US and British Propaganda Policy at the Beginning of the Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), especially chap. 6, “American Cold War Propaganda Efforts during the First Eisenhower Administration,” and chap. 7, “Cultural Infiltration: A New Propaganda Strategy for a New Era of Soviet-West Relations.”
11 See Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus” and Djagalov, From Internationalism.
12 Kanafani, “Study from Palestine,” pp. 65–79. There is a footnote to the title on p. 65: “This report was submitted as a document of the Third Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, Beirut, March 1967. Data cited are related to the situation prior to the Israeli aggression in June 1967.”
13 Maha Nassar has written extensively on these connections, particularly with respect to Palestinian writers within Israel, and solidarity with the anti-Vietnam War and Black rights movements in the United States. See Maha Nassar, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017); “‘My Struggle Embraces Every Struggle’: Palestinians in Israel and Solidarity with Afro-Asian Liberation Movements,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 2014): pp. 74–101, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24877900; and more recently, “Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement prior to 1967,” in “Black-Palestinian Transnational Solidarity,” special issue, JPS 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019): pp. 17–32, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.17.
14 See my forthcoming article: Elizabeth M. Holt, “Specters of Mao,” in “New Directions in Global South Studies,” special issue, ed. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra and Anne Garland Mahler, Comparative Literature Studies.
15 Ghassan Kanafani, Fi al-adab al-sahyuni (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, 1967; Cyprus, Rimal Publications, 2015). Kanafani is in conversation with the work of literary critics as well, citing studies of Jewish and Zionist literature by scholars including Leah Goldberg, Mordecai Kaplan, Dove Sadan, Haim Greenberg, David Bakan, Reuben Wallenrod, Elmer Berger, Menachem Ribalow, and Edgar Rosenberg.
16 Ghassan Kanafani, “Al-’irq wa-l-din fi al-adab al-sahyuni” [Race and religion in Zionist literature], Filastin 11 (25 March 1965); and Kanafani, “Al-‘Arab fil-adab al-sahyuni” [Arabs in Zionist literature], Filastin 12 (5 April 1965).
17 Kanafani, Fi al-adab al-sahyuni, p. 158.
18 See Radwa Ashour, Al-Tariq ila al-khayma al-ukhra: Dirasa fi a‘mal Ghassan Kanafani (‘Akka: Dar al-aswar, 1977). For other Arabic-language studies that compare Kanafani and Faulkner, see: ‘Adil al-Usta, “Ta’thir al-riwaya al-gharbiyya fil-riwaya al-filastiniyya: Muqarana ula” (an unpublished paper that overlaps with the talk the author delivered at the panel discussion of Kanafani on 14 July 2012 in Nablus, part of a festival commemorating Kanafani on the fortieth anniversary of his assassination); see also “Khilal nadwa nazzamaha al-muntada al-tanwiri fi Nablus,” Al-hayat al-jadida, http://www.alhayat-j.com/arch_page.php?nid=179542; ‘Izz al-Din al-Munasira, Al-muthaqafa wa-l-naqd al-muqarin: Manzur ishkali (Beirut: Al-mu’assasa al-’arabiyya lil-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1995); Fayha ‘Abd al-Hadi, Ghassan Kanafani: Al-riwaya wa-l-qissa al-qasira (Jerusalem: Al-jam‘iya al-filastiniyya al-akadimiyya lil-shu’un al-dawliyya, 1990); Fadl al-Naqib, Hakadha tantahi al-qissas, hakadha tabda’: Intiba’at shakhsiyya ‘an hayat Ghassan Kanafani wa-Basil al-Kabisi [So stories end, so they begin: Personal impressions from the lives of Ghassan Kanafani and Basil al-Kabisi] (Jerusalem: Mu’assasat Wisam lil-tiba‘ah wal-nashr, 1988); Habib Boulos, “Nuqat al-iltiqa’ wal-ibti’ad/al-tashabuh wal-takhaluf bayna riwayat Al-sakhab wal-‘unf li-Faulkner wa-riwayat Ma tabaqqa lakum li-Ghassan Kanafani,” Al-hiwar al-mutamaddin, 7 May 2010, https://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=214425&r=0.
19 ‘Adil al-Usta, “Ta’thir al-riwaya al-gharbiyya fi al-riwaya al-filastiniyya.” On Russian literary influences on Palestinian literary production, see also Nassar, Brothers Apart; and Spencer Scoville, “Reconsidering Nahdawi Translation: Bringing Pushkin to Palestine,” The Translator 21, no. 2 (2015): pp. 223–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2015.1073466. Margaret Litvin’s work on Arab students studying in the USSR, and her larger ongoing project on Soviet Cold War interventions in Arabic thought, literature, and film, offer further context. See especially her recent translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice (London: Seagull Books, 2019); and “Fellow Travelers? Two Arab Study Abroad Narratives of Moscow,” in Roberta Micallef, ed., Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age (Boston, MA: ILEX Books, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2018).
20 Fayiz Rashid, “Ghassan Kanafani khatta bi-dammihi adab muqawamatina,” Al-watan, 6 July 2017.
21 Fadil ‘Abbas Hadi, “Qadiyat Filastin . . . wa-l-riwaya al-‘arabiyya al-mu ‘asira,” [The question of Palestine . . . and the contemporary Arabic novel] Al-hadaf 156 (1 July 1972): p. 15.
22 Walid Khalidi, “The Fall of Haifa Revisited,” JPS 37, no. 3 (Spring 2008): p. 48, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2008.37.3.30. The original version of this article appeared as Walid Khalidi, “The Fall of Haifa,” Middle East Forum (December 1959).
23 Walid Khalidi, “Hawla mawaqif al-Gharb min al-qadiyya al-filastiniyya,” Hiwar 9 (1964): p. 11.
24 Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 32.
25 Unsi al-Hajj, “The Issue of the Journal Hiwar” [in Arabic], Mulhaq al-nahar, 12 June 1966, p. 19. Quoted in Holt, “‘Bread or Freedom.’”
26 Ghassan Kanafani, Maqalat Faris Faris: Kitabat sakhira, ed. Muhammad Dakroub (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1996), p. 92.
27 Kanafani, Maqalat Faris Faris, p. 93.
28 Kanafani, Maqalat Faris Faris, p. 93.
29 Susie Linfield, “Arthur Koestler: The Zionist as Anti-Semite,” in The Lion’s Den: Zionism and the Left, from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and Louis A. Gordon, “Arthur Koestler and His Ties to Zionism and Jabotinsky,” Studies in Zionism 12, no. 2 (1991): pp. 149–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/13531049108575987.
30 Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender, The God that Failed: A Confession, ed. Richard Crossman, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), pp. 21–22.
31 Koestler, The God That Failed, 36.
32 Arthur Koestler, Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1946), p. 145.
33 Koestler, Thieves, p. 242.
34 Koestler, Thieves, p. 292
35 Koestler, Thieves, p. 24.
36 Koestler, Thieves, p. 3.
37 Koestler, Thieves, p. 167.
38 Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Three Continents Press, 1983), p. 9.
39 Frank L. Goldstein and Benjamin F. Findley, Psychological Operations: Principles and Case Studies (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1996), p. 4.
40 See Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 142.
41 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 2000), p. 90.
42 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 59.
43 See, for instance, George Kateb, “The Road to 1984,” Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1966): pp. 569–70, https://doi.org/10.2307/2146905.
44 Michael Scammell, “A Discovery in the Moscow Archives: Arthur Koestler Resigns,” New Republic, 4 May 1998, p. 28.
45 Michael Scammel, “A Different ‘Darkness at Noon,’” New York Review of Books, 7 April 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/07/a-different-darkness-at-noon/.
46 Martine Poulain, “A Cold War Best-Seller: The Reaction to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in France from 1945 to 1950,” Libraries and Culture 36, no. 1 (Winter 2001): p. 173, https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2001.0016.
47 Poulain, “A Cold-War Best-Seller,” p. 174.
48 Poulain, “A Cold-War Best-Seller,” p. 172.
49 Poulain, “A Cold-War Best-Seller,” p. 175.
50 Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (1940; repr., London: Vintage, 1994), p. 31.
51 Scammell, “A Discovery,” p. 30.
52 Koestler, Darkness, pp. 40–41.
53 Koestler, Darkness, p. 70.
54 Koestler, Darkness, pp. 52–53.
55 See the cover of and photo insert in Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989).
56 Michael Scammel, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 358. See also Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, p. 142.
57 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 57.
58 See Appendix A of Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy, pp. 249–51; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 312.
59 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 4. Emphasis in original.
60 Shurayh, ed., Mudhakkirat Tawfiq Sayigh, p. 64.
61 As quoted in Maha Nassar, “Looking Out, Cheering On: Global Leftist Vocabularies among Palestinian Citizens of Israel,” in The Global 1960s: Conventions, Contest and Countercultures, ed. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Tamara Chaplin (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 261.
62 On Franklin Books, see Amanda Laugesen, “Books for the World: American Book Programs in the Developing World, 1948–68,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, ed. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014); and Louise S. Robbins, “Publishing American Values: The Franklin Book Programs as Cold War Cultural Diplomacy,” Library Trends, Volume 55, no. 3 (Winter 2007): pp. 638–50, https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2007.0022. See also Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, pp. 102, 278, and Creswell, City of Beginnings, pp. 41, 47. On al-Sayyab, see Elliott Colla, “Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Cold War Poet,” Middle Eastern Literatures 18, no. 3 (2015): pp. 247–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2016.1199093. In addition to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Tawfiq Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, Samira Azzam, Wadad al-Qadi, and Ihsan Abbas, the guide to the Franklin Book Programs archive, held at Princeton University Library Special Collections in the Seeley G. Mudd Library’s Public Policy Papers, mentions several other prominent Arab intellectuals who were also working with the CCF, including Lewis Awad, Ibrahim Bayoumi Madkour, and Jamal Ahmed. One notes also that their administrative records [Series 2: Administrative Records, 1952–78; Subseries 1: New York Office Records 1952–78; and Subseries 3: Country Files, 1952-78] include correspondence with ARAMCO.
63 Haddadian-Moghaddam, “Faulkner and Franklin,” pp. 3–5.
64 Robbins, “Publishing American Values,” p. 639.
65 Consider Najati Sidqi, “I Went to Defend Jerusalem in Cordoba: Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist in the Spanish International Brigades,” Jerusalem Quarterly 62 (Spring 2015): pp. 102–9.
66 See Creswell, City of Beginnings, p. 47.
67 Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, p. 174.
68 Tawfiq Yousef, “The Reception of William Faulkner in the Arab World,” American Studies International 33, no. 2 (October 1995): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41279343. Reading from Kanafani’s diary, Bashir Abu Manneh recounts Kanafani’s hallucinatory encounter with Faulkner as he completed All That’s Left to You: “Last night I finished writing my new novel, and when I lay the pen down and got up to leave the room, something strange happened. Willy Faulkner was standing there shaking my hand in congratulation.” Quoted in Bashir Abu Manneh, The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 81.
69 Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, p. 125. Barnhisel makes no mention of Faulkner in Arabic.
70 Andrew Rubin quoting Fredric Jameson. See Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 66; and Fredric Jameson, “New Literary History after the End of the New,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (July 2008): p. 379, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.0.0038.
71 Rubin, Archives of Authority.
72 Letter dated 18 January 1962, from John Hunt to Jamal Ahmed, box 165, folder 4, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files, Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–67, Subsubseries 8: “H,” IACF.
73 Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, p. 174.
74 Letter dated 5 February 1960 from John Hunt to Anis Sayigh, Cecil Hourani, Denys Johnson-Davies, and Constantine Zurayk, box 164, folder 1, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files, Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–67, Subsubseries 8: “H,” IACF.
75 Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, p. 175.
76 “Mithaq: Rabitat al-kuttab al-afriqiyyin al-asiyawiyyin,” p. 149; on “resistance,” see n2 above; the AAWA here adopts the same verb, qawama.
77 Letter dated 3 December 1959, from John Hunt to Jayaprakash Narayan c/o Arthur Koestler, box 163, folder 10, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files, Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–67, Sub-subseries 8: “H,” IACF.
78 Letter dated 11 December 1959, from John Hunt to Melvin Lasky, box 163, folder 10, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files, Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–67, Sub-subseries 8: “H,” IACF.
79 Itinerary, dated 9 November 1959, for John Hunt in London to multiple recipients (in French), box 163, folder 10, Series II: Correspondence and Subject Files, Subseries I: Correspondence and Subject Files, 1948–67, Sub-subseries 8: “H,” IACF.
80 Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, p. 184.
81 Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, p. 183.
82 As quoted in Nassar, “Looking Out,” p. 261.
83 Sayigh, Anis Sayigh, pp. 185–86.
84 Holt, “‘Bread or Freedom.’”
85 Ghassan Kanafani, “Adab al-muqawama fi Filastin al-muhtalla,” Al-adab 14, no. 7 (July 1966): pp. 1–3, 65–71.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Elizabeth M. Holt
Elizabeth M. Holt is associate professor of Arabic at Bard College, where she codirects the Middle Eastern Studies Program. She is the author of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). This essay is part of her forthcoming book, Imperious Plots: Cultural Infiltration and Arabic Literature in the Cold War.