Melancholy Acts – Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World

"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. 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

"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.' A must read"--Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota

How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in conditions of precarity and injustice? 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 dispossession and military defeat.

Tracing the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions, and the rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point, Melancholy Acts contributes a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Gana reads literary and cultural production alongside the work of Arab as well as Euro-American intellectuals, and confronts 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.

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.

Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.