Utopia and Dystopia in Palestinian Circular Journeys from Ghassān Kanafānī to Contemporary Film

This article traces narratives in Palestinian literature and film that are structured by utopian circular journeys of movement and encounter. Through close readings of three short stories by Ghassān Kanafānī—‘Six Eagles and a Child,’ ‘The Bride,’ and ‘He Was a Child That Day,’ written in the 1950s and 1960s—and the films Ford Transit (Hany Abu Assad, 2002) and Lailaʹs Birthday (Rashid Masharawi, 2008), the article demonstrates the durability of the trope of the utopian circular journey in Palestinian narratives and explains how each text manipulates the temporal mode of its narration to render that trope relevant to the historical moment in which it is made. By excavating the use of the utopian circular journey by Palestinian storytellers from different decades, the analysis contextualizes current Palestinian cinema within a history of Palestinian narration, thereby revealing meanings that are not evident from readings that only consider the contemporary socio-political context in which Palestinian films are made today.