Description:

Lunch will be served at this event.

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.

Nouri Gana teaches Comparative Literature at the University of California Los Angeles.  He researches in the intersecting fields of modern and contemporary multilingual Arab literatures and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East; Arab popular music and film; comparative ethnic, Muslim and Arab diasporas studies, namely in Euro-Americas; and postcolonial and modernist comparative cultural studies.  He received his PhD from the University of Montreal.