Pan-Arab Introspection: Men in the Sun and The Duped (1972)

Abstract

This essay will explore the translation of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun in its screen adaptation by Tawfik Saleh, The Duped (1972). The objective is to locate the divergence from mainstream pan-Arabism and the perceptions resulting from the events taking place between 1943 and 1967. The latter year specifically works as the hinge-pin between one phase of pan-Arabism into another far more critical, and far less naive phase in the subsequent decades thereafter. In what follows, notions of filmic naturalism and pan-national trauma will be explored in order to establish the significance of Kanafani's work in abandoning the techniques of melodrama, as associated with popular Arabic cinema, for a far more sceptic tone regarding pan-Arab solidarity. Ultimately, the efforts herein are to establish a move from dominating studies that place the Arab as a subject of Western narratives in preference of how Arabs envision and therefore think themselves through their own stories, tales, and mores.