One of the major concerns of writers of postcolonial literature in contemporary Moroccan cultural production is how the intellectual legacy of the resistance movement of the 1960s is negotiated, performed and contested today. In Laila Lalami’s Secret son (2006), the focus on the present social and political realities involves a critique of the processes constituted by political and social forces that have prevailed in the post-independence national state. In this regard, Lalami looks at the failures and disparities within a historical frame—one that represents the evolution and devolution of the ideological formations born of the 1960s resistance movement. It depicts social disarray and political decay that generate subjectivities that have become polarized in their allegiances to past ideals of political commitment and cultural resistance against a present characterized by the disavowal of these commitments and the pursuit of neoliberal agendas of self-promotion. This becomes particularly salient in the behavior of the protagonist’s father, Nabil Amrani. In this paper, I argue that Lalami’s novel connects the ongoing struggle for social and cultural self-definition with the unfinished/aborted resistance movement of the 1960s and explores how this idealistic moment in Moroccan socio-political life continues to inform present struggles against economic structural inequalities and the persistent demands for equitable political rights and social justice. I also explore how the issue of resistance against hegemonic structures of domination and control, represented through generational shifts and the transformation of the protagonist’s family, impact subject formation, cultural identity and the perception of the past revolutionary legacy.