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? Join us for a talk with Nouri Gana, whose latest book 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.
Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition to Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World, he is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects, and The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English.
This event is sponsored by the Department of Comparative Studies, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Culture, the Department of History, the Humanities Institute, the Middle East Studies Center and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
This event is free and open to the public. For questions about this event, contact Shurouq Ibrahim at ibrahim.278@osu.edu.
