Melancholy Acts

A cogent articulation of the crucial role of Arab literature and cinema in inspiring human resilience and cultural resistance under conditions of political oppression and censorship in the Middle East and North Africa

Contributor: Nouri Gana 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).

Melancholy Acts expands the theoretical and literary parameters of colonial trauma and its afterlife, extending to oft-neglected contexts, and is thus indispensable to postcolonial scholars. --- Nouri Gana’s Melancholy Acts is an all-too-timely sustained examination of loss and melancholia as a form of resistance in the Arab world from the 1948 Nakba to the 1967 Naksa and after. . . Gana does specifically for Arab populations what Franz Fanon accomplished more broadly for postcolonial populations by drawing attention to the forms of resistance resulting from the postcolonial psychological condition. --- Nouri Gana’s Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World offers a profound and innovative examination of the emotional and political complexities shaping the Arab world. . . By combining rigorous theoretical analysis with close readings of cultural texts, Melancholy Acts offers a fresh perspective on the role of melancholy in Arab cultural and political life, challenging traditional notions of melancholic passivity and offering new ways of thinking about the intersections of affect, culture, and politics in the Arab world, towards, as he beautifully concludes, a decolonial project of emancipation. --- Melancholy Acts is a powerful expression of the Arab world’s literary and cinematic production, which has endured and obstinately defied colonial and postcolonial occupation, Western encroachments, and autocratic regimes. . . It would be a valuable reference for postcolonial and cultural studies, comparative literature, and film, among others. Highly recommended. --- . . .[T]the book comprises one of the most significant readings of Arab contemporaneity that we have. --- In Melancholy Acts, Nouri Gana travels between Algeria and Tunisia to Palestine and Egypt, examining the impact of European colonization and Israeli apartheid on Arab culture. Gana is unique among today’s critics in firmly grounding his literary and psychoanalytic discussions of poetry and fiction, theory and film in current and past events, and in emphasizing the role that Euro-American invasions and economic neocolonialism play in the making of a defeatist melancholy within the Arab psyche. Gana’s book is a powerful call for Arab thinkers and artists to turn melancholy into a discourse of empowerment and a ‘decolonial project of emancipation.’ In its call to action and in its incisive analyses, Melancholy Acts is a must read. --- In this lucid and powerful book, Nouri Gana offers a new understanding of militant melancholia in the course of patient, attentive, and consequential readings of Arab cultural production, including poetry, novels, films, and plays. Distinguishing between forms of melancholia as they enter into the critique of colonialism, Gana makes a strong and remarkable case for the power of melancholia in acts of cultural critique. Taking on insouciant critics and confounding theorists who dismiss or reduce the power of melancholy, Gana proves himself to be a singular and brilliant critic and theorist, letting psychoanalysis have a new life in the field of political resistance.