From Harlem to Gaza: Resisting Necropolitics and Orientalist Violence in RalphEllison’s Invisible Man and Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54536/ajahs.v4i4.5984Keywords:
Necropolitics, Orientalism, Racial Capitalism, Resistance, Settler ColonialismAbstract
This article compares Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (1969) to demonstrate how racial capitalism and settler colonialism converge in necropolitical and Orientalist regimes that mark Black and Palestinian lives as expendable. Ellison’s narrator becomes both hypervisible and invisible in Jim Crow America, forced into spectacles such as the Battle Royal and erased in the Liberty Paints factory. Kanafani’s Said and Safiyya return to a home renamed and reoccupied, where they discover their lost child has become an Israeli soldier, a scene that enacts the settler logic of “destroy to replace”. Methodologically, the article employs close reading and comparative analysis, drawing on necropolitics, racial capitalism to situate state violence, while engaging Black radical thought and Palestinian memory studies to interpret resistance. The study finds that while Ellison develops fugitivity and opacity in an underground space of narration, Kanafani affirms sumud through embodied memory and testimony that reclaims erased space. Together, these texts show that literature not only reflects oppression but also generates counter-archives and counter-geographies that sustain transnational solidarities and imagine decolonial futures.
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