About

Nouri Gana is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal, Québec, obtained in 2004, an M.A. from the same institution in 1999, and a B.A. from Université de Manouba in Tunisia in 1997. His research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary multilingual Arab literatures and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East, Arab popular music and film, and comparative ethnic, Muslim, and Arab diasporas studies, particularly in Euro-Americas. He is engaged in postcolonial and modernist comparative cultural studies and welcomes doctoral projects that explore the relations between the poetics and politics of literatures and cultures.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Literature
• Political Science
• History
• Art
• Gender studies
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• History, Memory, and Affect in Postcolonial Arabic Literature and Film

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature · 2024-10-22 · 1 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While modern Arab history has been marked largely by the experience of colonialism, postcolonial Arab history has been marked particularly by the Palestinian experience of settler colonialism. From the occupation of Palestine in 1948 to the occupation of Iraq in 2003, colonial entrenchments and encroachments have cast a long shadow on the decolonial achievements of several Arab countries, especially during the successful Egyptian and Algerian revolutions in the 1950s. Arabs have come to realize that Arab culture, literature, and film constitute a repository for these experiences, especially in the wake of the 1967 Naksa, the cataclysmic defeat of three Arab armies by Israel. Despite the turn to affect in early 21st-century scholarship, and a much earlier explosion of works on mourning and melancholia in post-World War II modernist and postcolonial studies, there is little theoretical and critical work done at the intersection between Arabic literature and affect theory—a puzzling lacuna, given the centrality of affect in everyday Arab culture and the aforementioned historical convulsions experienced by Arab countries in colonial and postcolonial times. Nothing can be gained by giving short shrift to the affective toll of the serial colonial and postcolonial defeats suffered by Arab regimes. Affect is inextricably related to subjective experience and individual agency but it is increasingly enmeshed in politics and political mobilization. Grief, for instance, has always taken forms of response that range from declarations of love to declarations of war. Note, for instance, the outpouring of love that followed Lady Diana’s tragic passing or Michael Jackson’s similar fate. By contrast, note the serial declarations of war that followed the tragic events of 9/11 or October 7. The bombings of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, more recently, Libya and Syria, not to mention the catastrophic bombings of Gaza by Israel, all took place because or in spite of grief, and in order to fulfill or foreclose mourning. Colonial powers prescribe offensive and retaliatory violence to settle grief yet proscribe the same measures to the populations in whose dispossession and terrorization they are implicated. The stakes of grief seem so high that they decide who has the monopoly on violence and who wants to subvert that monopoly and claim their rightful share of the use of violence to inflict or overcome grief. Arab culture, literature, and film are bloated with ungrieved and ungrievable corpses, staking, as it were, a claim from beyond the grave to memory and justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Melancholy Formations

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

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  The aim of this inaugural chapter is to demonstrate the extent to which political and military defeats have spawned a psychoaffective disposition toward melancholy, and become the recurring site of creative and critical inquiry, exacerbated even further by a predominant sense of unstoppable technoeconomic belatedness and existential precarity. The chapter embarks on a series of analyses of an eclectic number of plays, novels, poems, films, and cites short critical statements and dictums and at times even aphorisms that best dramatize the cultural, political, and discursive gamut of the collective disposition toward melancholy. In the meanwhile, what becomes clear is that Arab subjectivity is unthinkable outside the collusion/collision between local authoritarianism and Euro-American imperialism. The melancholy turn of Arab subjectivity accompanies its commitment to the transformative project of liberation. From Nouri Bouzid and Chokri Mabkhout to Ghassan Kanafani and Annemarie Jacir through Youssef Chahine and Sonallah Ibrahim, the liberation of the individual emerges as one of the most urgent conditions of national liberation. In the end, the chapter fleshes out the notion of “melancholy acts” through sustained reflections on the question of iltizām or commitment in the aftermath of the ongoing Nakba and Naksa.

  PublisherDOI

• Note on Translation and Transliteration

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract All translations from Arabic and French are my own, unless otherwise indicated. All transliterations are either from Arabic or dialect. I have adopted the IJMES transliteration system, except for proper names.

  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

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  The epilogue builds on Benslama’s pathologizing view of melancholy in order, first, to expose his sanctioned displacements of historical reality into the structural determinacies of religion and language and, second, to further situate melancholy in a spectrum of psychopolitical differentials that range from melancholy pride to melancholy critique.

  PublisherDOI

• Melancholy Ends

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter starts by exploring the aporias and dilemmas of representation that Arab writers and artists confront at a time when the Arab world has become overly mediatized and ideologically territorialized as a zone of sectarian violence and death. For all the reports on Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, the Arab world suffers from what might be called a collapse of witnessing. The chapter focuses mainly on the controversies over the humanization of terrorism in Hany Abu-Assad’s film <italic>Paradise Now</italic> (al-jannah-tul-ān) and demonstrates the ways in which the film grapples with the construction of a narrative of terrorism that cannot be pre-discursively (and on licensed grounds) discredited as a justification of terror. Cognizant of suicide protest as a melancholy act par excellence, the film invests in a minimalist aesthetics of failure (“camera failure”) and prolonged close-up scenes as well as in comic relief in order to reclaim and stage the right to narrate the tragedy of Palestine and to challenge the racial and geopolitical differentials on the grounds of which humanity is constructed, valued, allocated, or withheld.

  PublisherDOI

• Melancholy Acts

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  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? Could the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? <italic>Melancholy Acts</italic> offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging analytical engagements with modern, postcolonial and contemporary Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. Across six chapters, <italic>Melancholy Acts</italic> reads with both 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. 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); along with a number of prominent Arab intellectuals, including Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, read in dialogue with Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek. <italic>Melancholy Acts</italic> charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, namely the rhetorical swerves of symptoms into acts of dissent, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Melancholy Forms

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Taking its cue from Theodor Adorno’s by now infamous dictum that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” this chapter examines the different configurations of Adorno’s dictum in contemporary Arabic poetry that continues to fall irresistibly, not so much under the shadow of the Holocaust, as under the shadow of its proximate historical corollary, the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. Many Arab poets have made similar pronouncements to that of Adorno about the impossibility of poetry after every post-Nakba political onslaught on Arabland, starting from the devastating 1967 Israeli preemptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria up to the more recent “Operation Iraqi Freedom” orchestrated by the so-called Coalition of the Willing against Iraq. Studying an eclectic but substantial number of poems composed by such canonical contemporary figures as Nizār Qabbānī, Adonis, and especially Mahmoud Darwish, this chapter demonstrates how Arab poets strategically (and by now even routinely) conjure up the muse of impossibility of poetry (following every act of violence committed against Arab nations since the Nakba) in order to produce poetry. The chapter delves into the politics of form, the aesthetic and ethical morass of writing in the aftermath of catastrophe. More specifically, it strives both to discern the psychoaffective dynamics of modern Arabic poetry and to ponder the precarious and elegiac rhetorical modes of its critical intervention in a culture continually strained to its breaking point.

  PublisherDOI

• Melancholy Islam

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • History

  The final chapter seeks to understand the psychodynamics of suicidal protest at the crossroads of postcolonialism, Islamism, and psychoanalysis with a particular focus on the work of Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama. For George Tarabishi, because Arabs have been stripped of their subjectivity, they were forced to find shelter in tradition; similarly, for Benslama the fantasy of return to origins that marks the Islamist project is spurred by the impasses of subjectivity brought about by the end of the Islamic caliphate. This chapter examines how Benslama makes use of Lacanian vocabulary in order to deconstruct the myth of origin in Islam and the melancholite economy of jouissance that sustains it. There is a tendency in Benslama, however, to reduce what is historical to what is structural or endemic to Muslim societies; the effect is at times more demystifying than illuminating. The chapter engages with Benslama’s alternatives to the Muslim impasses of subjectivity and concludes by taking Benslama’s own construction of a female Muslim itinerary of Islamic history as a salutary example of non-violent melancholic critique that the book has tried to account for throughout the different literary and cultural examples discussed. Women, according to Benslama, are the unacknowledged midwives of monotheistic and Islamic origin par excellence.

  PublisherDOI

• Epigraph

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Melancholy Manhood

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023-08-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter focuses on the psychodynamics of modernity and traditionalism in the aftermath of French colonialism in Tunisia. Habib Bourguiba’s rule (1956–1987) produced a breed of men that might be aptly called Bourguiba’s sons. Suspended in a state of mutability that is simultaneously cultivated and frustrated, they have been able neither to come to terms with the challenges of modernity, of which gender equality is part and parcel, nor to relinquish fully the protective shelter of traditional patriarchy, in which male supremacy is the grantor of psychosocial stability. Postcolonial films by Moufida Tlatli, Nadia Fares, Férid Boughedir, and Nouri Bouzid draw a markedly melancholy portrait of manhood. The challenges of modernity have come to cast a grim shadow on the traditional dimensions of manhood, masculinity, and sexuality. Melancholy manhood is born when a loss or crisis of old conceptions of manhood has taken place but has not been accompanied with the parallel and adequate psychosocial and hermeneutic readjustment necessary for its resolution.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• F Dahab

  California State University, Long Beach

  64 shared

• Michelle Hartman

  McGill University

  64 shared

• Francesco Cavatorta

  Université Laval

  4 shared

• Fabio Merone

  Université Laval

  3 shared

• Ricardo René Larémont

  Binghamton University

  3 shared

• Osama Abi-Mershed

  3 shared

• Paul A. Silverstein

  Reed College

  3 shared

• Alice Wilson

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• New Directions Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundati…
• Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdo…
• Rackham Faculty Research Grant from the Rackham Graduate Sch…