Narrating the subaltern resistance: Aesthetic strategies in Mornings in Jenin

Abstract

How can literature become a site of political resistance? The present paper endeavors to answer this question through a close reading of Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010), contending that the novel’s aesthetic strategies are a premeditated political praxis rather than simply formal embellishment. Informed by an interdisciplinary framework that synthesizes postcolonial studies, trauma theories, and hermeneutic aesthetics, the study develops the concept of an ‘Aesthetic Poetics of Resistance’ to prove how the novel’s fragmented temporality, polyphonic narrative, and symbolic density transcend the political and historical trauma of Palestinian dilemma into powerful cultural memory. The analysis shows that these aesthetic preferences are not ornamental but politically yielding. They are formulated to encounter hegemonic colonial discourse, present new constituents of Palestinian subjectivity, and acknowledge the power of literature to expose what complicit powers have suppressed. The study’s primary argument is that aesthetic form and political content are not compatible but mutually formative in Mornings in Jenin. This has repercussions that extend far beyond the novel itself, offering a systematic and applicable methodological paradigm for productive reading of diaspora and resistance literature.