Palestinian Road Narratives From Ghassan Kanafani to Hany Abu Assad In many of his fictional writings, most notably Men in the Sun and All that is Left of You (both of which were made into films), Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani creates dystopian desert journeys in which his characters—Palestinian men emasculated and broken by the defeat of 1948 and subsequent experience with exile and loss--suffer isolation, misdirection, predation, and ultimately, death. The road in his works is a place of danger primarily because his characters travel without clear political goals. The road, then, as a dystopian place, is a reflection of the political disarray that Kanafani saw in the Palestinian condition in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This dystopia is eloquently captured in Tawfiq Salih’s The Dupes, a film adaptation of Men in the Sun. The road is constructed quite differently in Palestinian narratives today. Roads, despite their dangers and frustrations are places that Palestinians want to be in post-Oslo Palestinian fiction. Palestinians in recent works lay claim to road spaces, insisting on their right to occupy them, and engaging in performances of identity within them. This paper will examine the difference in the trope of the road in Palestinian narrative film of the early 1960s and 1970s and the mid-1990s and beyond by comparing The Dupes and feature length works by filmmakers Hany Abu Assad, and Rashid Masharawi (Rana’s Wedding, Ford Transit, and Paradise Now by Abu Assad and Ticket to Jerusalem, Waiting, and Laila’s Wedding by Masharawi). The paper will elucidate how each of these directors exploits the road movie genre (in particular the nature of the road as a public space; the ironic distance created between protagonists and the societies and spaces they travel through; and the role of space in subject formation) to comment on Palestinian changing relationships to politics and community.