{"product_id":"melancholy-acts-defeat-and-cultural-critique-in-the-arab-world-9781531503499","title":"Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eCHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eHow 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? \u003ci\u003eMelancholy Acts \u003c\/i\u003eoffers 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eMelancholy Acts\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eMelancholy Acts\u003c\/i\u003e reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic \u003ci\u003eiltizām\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eMelancholy Acts\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNouri Gana \u003c\/b\u003eis Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eSignifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning \u003c\/i\u003e(2011) and editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects \u003c\/i\u003e(2013) and \u003ci\u003eThe Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture \u003c\/i\u003e(2013).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Fordham University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50923160862994,"sku":"9781531503499","price":130.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_c43c3309-8db6-48c3-bfdf-a5d4a121425f.jpg?v=1738945355","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/melancholy-acts-defeat-and-cultural-critique-in-the-arab-world-9781531503499","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}