WOMEN AGENCY AND CULTURAL SURVIVAL IN ABULHAWA’S MORNING IN JENIN: A FEMINIST STUDY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21872460Keywords:
Cultural Survival, Female Agency, Feminist Literary Criticism, Memory, Postcolonial Feminism, Resistance, NakbaAbstract
This study examines the representation of female agency and cultural survival in Abulhawa’s celebrated Palestinian novel Morning in Jenin (2010) through the analytical framework of postcolonial feminist literary criticism. Against the historical backdrop of the 1948 Nakba and subsequent decades of military occupation, violence, and forced exile. The novel foregrounds the lives, sacrifices, and resilience of Palestinian women. While mainstream conflict narratives often reduce women in war zones to passive victims or mere patriotic symbols. Abulhawa presents her female protagonists most notably Dalia, Amal, and Huda as active historical agents, dynamic cultural carriers, and curators of collective memory. Portray on the theoretical contributions of Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Sara Ahmed, and Marianne Hirsch. This research paper demonstrates how Palestinian women navigate the dual constraints of colonial oppression and domestic patriarchy. To reframe routine acts of development, emotional labor, storytelling, and domestic preservation as "everyday resistance". The results of the research identify the ways in which female agency is manifested in Abulhawa’s story. It is not only through fighting on the fronts and the traditional forms of protest that the women demonstrate their power. The study asserts that female characters maintain the continuity of Palestinian identity across generations, providing the essential foundation for cultural survival in the middle of historical effacement.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Syed Ammar Yasir, Dr. Uzma Shakoor, Prof. Dr. Mazhar Hayat, Muhammad Abubakar Jamil, Hassan Raza (Author)
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