The Department of Comparative Studies will host a book talk with Dr. Nouri Gana (UCLA). This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages, the Mershon Center, and the Humanities Institute.
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 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.
