Book talk | Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- Venue
- Brunei Gallery, SOAS
- Room
- B203
About this event
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 speaker
Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham University Press, 2023) & 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).
Registration
This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please note that seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
