Nouri Gana - "Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World" - Lisa Wedeen
Nouri Gana will discuss Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World. He will be joined in conversation by Lisa Wedeen. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
Presented in partnership with Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT).
At the Co-op
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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.
About the Author: 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).
About the Interlocutor: Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), and an associate of the Department of Anthropology. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019).
Related Titles
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? ...