Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World

The Michael E. Marmura Lectures in Arabic Studies 2023-24 presents "Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World."

This is a book talk discussing Gana’s recently published book Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham, 2023).

How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? In Melancholy Acts, Nouri Gana addresses these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. He tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of Arab and non-Arab intellectuals.

Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition to Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham University Press, 2023), he is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Bucknell UP, 2011/paperback 2015), and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects as well as The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013).