The short story as a form of resistance :a study of the short stories of Ghassan Kanafani, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Alice Walker

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of the short stories of Ghassan Kanafani, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Alice Walker. Although there are geographical and cultural distances which separate these authors, the fiction they wrote clearly makes their connection a tangible one. This study presents a reading of these short stories as examples of resistance literature, minority literature, postcolonialism, Marxism and realism. In it, I examine how these authors used the short story genre to engage in the struggle of their communities. The stories are interpreted as responses to specific historical moments in the Palestinian, Kenyan and African American contexts. The stories also scrutinize the colonial relations and show a kind of resistance against the hegemony of the colonizers. The themes of the stories examined in this study are colonization and the oppression, dispossession and displacement brought on by colonialism. The aim of this study is to show how Kanafani, Ngugi and Walker use their fiction, the short story genre in particular, as an arena of struggle in which they register their political convictions, and how their fiction displays their firm belief in the inevitability of change. In their short stories the history of the past is passed on to the new generations, and their task is to learn from the lessons of the past to better understand the present and plan for a better future. In short, the study aims at researching the implications of colonialism and postcolonialism in the lives of the Palestinian, Kenyan and African American peoples as portrayed in the short fiction of our authors.