Book Talk and Conversation with Nouri Gana on Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World
Global Middle East Studies Working Group
April 10, 2024
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Location
Arab American Cultural Center, 101 Taft Hall
Address
826 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileJoin the Global Middle East Studies Working Group and the Arab American Cultural Center in a book talk and discussion by Prof. Nouri Gana about his latest book 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? 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. Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book 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).
About the Author: Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (2011) and editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (2013) and The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture (2013).
Event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities Global Middle East Studies Working Group , The Social Justice Initiative, Department of English, Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. Space is Accessible by Wheelchair.
Date posted
Mar 11, 2024
Date updated
Mar 11, 2024