{"product_id":"melancholy-acts-nouri-gana-9781531503505","title":"Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World","description":"\u003cp\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. \u003c\/p\u003e\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\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Nouri Gana\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1531503500\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781531503505\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Fordham University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 08\/01\/2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 332\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.07lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.74d","brand":"Nouri Gana","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":44080678895871,"sku":"9781531503505","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_2fb00937-6798-4867-9c0a-314f85849433.jpg?v=1685488186","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/melancholy-acts-nouri-gana-9781531503505","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}