Melancholy Acts

Looking at Arab cultural production, this week’s review examines “militant melancholia as a mode of emancipation, search for justice, and decolonization.”

Posted on April 14, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World

Gana, Nouri. Fordham, 2023
332p bibl index, 9781531503499 $125.00, 9781531503505 $35.00, 9781531503512

Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World book cover.

Melancholy Acts is a powerful expression of the Arab world’s literary and cinematic production, which has endured and obstinately defied colonial and postcolonial occupation, Western encroachments, and autocratic regimes. Deploying psychoanalytic reasoning across Arabic novels, poems, plays, films, and philosophical theories—namely a renewed insight on melancholy acts—Gana (Univ. of California) effectively elevates melancholia to revive what was deemed dead. He dissects the notion of defeatism (namely the 1967 Arab defeat and the Euro-American incursions) that has plagued the Arab psyche, and exhorts the Arab scholars and artists to deploy militant melancholia as a mode of emancipation, search for justice, and decolonization through embracing Arab causes delicately and resolutely. Erudite and bold, this uncompromising book draws on, and primarily dares, the ideas of some of the most seminal Arab and non-Arab thinkers. Whereas Melancholy Acts delves into the thorniest and bleakest geopolitical and cultural Arab issues, it never abandons a measured hope. It would be a valuable reference for postcolonial and cultural studies, comparative literature, and film, among others.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: H. Bahri, The City University of New York, York College
Interdisciplinary Subject: Middle Eastern Studies
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – African & Middle Eastern
Choice Issue: Nov 2024

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