DefinePK

Abstract

This paper studies the reconstruction of Afghan female identity and culture in Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul (2004) through the lens of Donna Haraway’s cyborg concept (1991) and posthumanist and postcolonial thoughts, with a central focus on the character Zunaira. The study aims to reinterpret Zunaira’s character as a posthuman subject and identify Haraway’s cyborg concept, which locates Afghan female identity within a broader postcolonial and posthumanist framework. As a qualitative study, the paper integrates Haraway’s cyborg concept with both Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Michel Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge (1977), forming an interdisciplinary triadic framework. The paper employs textual and critical analysis to examine the symbolic, ideological, and narrative dimensions of Zunaira’s posthuman agency. The study demonstrates that Zunaira's resistance against essentialist constraints illustrates a form of hybrid subjectivity aligned with Haraway’s posthuman vision. In addition, the attempt to synthesize Haraway, Said, and Foucault's frameworks explores how literary constructions of Afghan women resist both in Western Orientalist discourses and local patriarchal control. Ahmad and Latif (2023) suggest that literary figures like Zunaira perform vital acts of symbolic defiance, while Barakzai (2023) emphasized the political stakes of female identity in post-Taliban literature. The paper contributes to an innovative understanding of how posthumanist literary criticism can inform both feminist and postcolonial literary studies.