Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World

by Nouri Gana

Overview

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.

Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek.

Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781531503499
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Note on Translation and Transliteration | ix

Introduction: Melancholy Acts | 1

1 Melancholy Formations: From Nakba to Naksa and Beyond | 45

2 Melancholy Forms: Poetry in the Aftermath of Catastrophe | 89

3 Enduring Left Melancholy: Recasting the Crisis of the Nasserite Intellectual | 123

4 Melancholy Manhood: Modernity and Neopatriarchy in Tunisian Cinema | 158

5 Melancholy Ends: Palestinian Film and Narrative Martyrdom | 195

6 Melancholy Islam: Jihad, Jouissance, and Female Clairvoyance | 234

Epilogue: Melancholy Critique | 277

Acknowledgments | 293

The Unsheltering Sky: A Note on the Cover Art | 297

Bibliography | 299

Index | 313

Editorial Reviews

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.

University of Minnesota Nabil Matar

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.

Universityof Minnesota Nabil Matar

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.

Judith Butler

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.-- "Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota"

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.-- "Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"

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