Captivity, Resistance and Political Consciousness in Walid Daqqa’s Prison Literature

Ajour, Ashjan

Captivity, Resistance and Political Consciousness in Walid Daqqa’s Prison Literature

Ajour, Ashjan (2025) Captivity, Resistance and Political Consciousness in Walid Daqqa’s Prison Literature. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 25 (1). ISSN 1481-4374

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4878

Abstract

This article examines the prison literature of the Palestinian intellectual Walid Daqqa who has been serving a life sentence for resistance since 1986 in Israeli prisons. From the depth of his experience he writes about his conceptualization of captivity, colonial violence, the resistance of the Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system and the construction of Palestinian national imagination in his book Consciousness Molded: or The Re-Identification of Palestinian Torture (2010) Published in Arabic and his first young adults novel The Story of the Oil’s Secret (Ḥikayat Sir al-Zeit) published in 2018 in Arabic. Daqqa has become a prominent figure in the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, He and his work deconstruct the violent structure of colonial prison, forging pathways toward liberation and resistance in that he plays a leading role in terms of praxis and knowledge production. His works narrate the story of Palestinian political captivity and the broader Palestinian historical national narrative reflecting the prison movement which is one of the major sites of the Palestinian national movement. Daqqa’s writing is a form of resistance in the Israeli prison system representing intellectual products that come from what he coins ‘parallel time’- time in captivity - as opposed to social time lived outside the prison bars.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.7771/1481-4374.4878
Dates:	Date Event 1 January 2025 Accepted 20 January 2025 Published Online
Subjects:	CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-02 - sociology
Divisions:	Law and Social Sciences > Criminology and Sociology > Sociology
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	16 Mar 2026 14:24
Last Modified:	16 Mar 2026 14:24
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/16925