Join us as author Nouri Gana presents his recently published book, “Melancholy Acts.” This event is open to the public.
About the author: Nouri Gana is a 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 UP, 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 (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013 & paperback 2015).
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.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Studies, the Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures Department, the Department of History, the Humanities Institute, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and the Middle Eastern Studies Center.
