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Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Brunei Gallery, SOAS
Room
B203

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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.

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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).

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This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please note that seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

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