Book Talk

Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World

ABOUT THE BOOK

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? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 & The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013/paperback 2015).

RESPONDENTS

• Saree Makdisi (Chair and Professor, English, UCLA)
• Jeffrey Sacks (Associate Professor and Chair, Comparative Literature & Arabic, UC Riverside)