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\"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. Melancholy Acts 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, Melancholy Acts reads with 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); 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\"-- Publisher.

Opening up the field of diasporic Anglo-Arab literature to critical debate, this companion spans from the first Arab novel in 1911 to the resurgence of the Anglo-Arabic novel in the last 20 years. There are chapters on authors such as Ameen Rihani, Ahdaf Soueif and Waguih Ghali, and interviews with Laila Lalami, Hisham Matar and Fadia Faqir.

By remapping the configurations of mourning across modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida), Signifying Loss studies not only how loss is signified but also the ethico-political significance of such signifying. First, by examining the dynamics between narrative tropes and mourning, it elaborates a poetics of narrative mourning in which prosopopoeia becomes the master trope of mourning while catachresis the master trope of melancholia and chiasmus of trauma. Second, it develops a situated and flexible theory of mourning, capable of adjusting to diverse contexts in which the ethical and political stakes of mourning are different-in short, Signifying Loss calls for the formulation of geopolitical and differential tactics of mourning and mournability rather that for a clear cut strategy of inconsolability.

This essay discusses the politics of affect in post-1967 Arabic literary and cultural production. It argues that melancholia’s underappreciated swerve from normative structures of power and mourning is a threshold moment of critical and cultural enablement in the Arab world, where the nexus between proxy and settler colonialisms continues to produce and reproduce almost all aspects of literature and culture.

The post-9/11 intensification of racism against Muslim and Arab Americans reflects the protean forms and shifts in focus and locus of racism form ethnic and color lines to religious and cultural affiliations or differentials. Here, Gana sketches the history of this ideologically driven racism and show how Muslim and Arab American writers have sought not merely to expose but also to intervene in the material and palpable workings of the complicit apparatuses of racism and war and explores how an eclectic group of North American Muslim and Arab writers make use of diverse narrative forms to challenge the inimical image of Islam and Arabness as well as the continual violence of which it is simultaneously the target and the product. He also analyzes the significance of human resilience and suffering in affirming a measure of communal and transnational solidarity.

Gana examines the representation of al-Andalus in the modern Arab literary imagination in general and more particularly in Crescent, by the Arab American author Diana Abu-Jaber. Drawing upon the critical vocabulary of Edward Said, he critiques the political agendas underlying the modern construction of an Iberian convivencia, and especially those informing its outright rejection in the late 20th and early 21st century. He also refers to William Granara's notion of the Andalusian chronotype and its significance in modern Arabic literature to guide the reader curious about why there are so many overt references and covert allusions to al-Andalus and Andalusis in many works of modern fiction.

Gana analyzes the ways in which Arab Canadian aesthetes have grappled with the subtly but largely incriminating discourses about Arabs that have been circulating with variable intensities since the first large wave of new Arab immigrants set foot in Canada (in the late 1960s and early 70s), and have gained momentum during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and in the wake of the Gulf War (1990-1991) until they radically intensified in the aftermath of 9/11. It is argued that Arab Canadians found no viable alternative of voicing their growing discontent but to confront the free-floating and intransigent mainstream discourses of Arabness with the individual and lived experiences of everyday Arabs and/or Arab everydayness.

Gana criticizes many commentators' tendency to explain away Middle East violence in terms of \"intransigent models of genetic and transhistorical ailments\" in order to \"privatize--and therefore dispense with--the political, historical, or colonial\" conditions that give rise to such violence. By contrast, he argues, Lebanese civil war literature bears witness to the enduring impulse to make sense of war and to discern and expose its concrete traumatic demarcations, calculated structural denominations, and profound derealizing effects. Taking his cue from trauma theory, Gana analyzes the poetics of mourning in Elias Khoury's experimental and fragmentary novel, City Gates, a poetics that prevents any easy formal or affective closure.

The year 1492 marks both a point of rupture and a point of departure, a rupture with the Moorish Andalusian presence in the Iberian Peninsula and a departure to the New World, which was “new” only in the sense that it had yet to be known—encountered, not discovered. Christopher Columbus’s sail to the Americas followed shortly after the crusading armies of King Ferdinand (Aragon) and Queen Isabella (Castile), cemented by their royal marriage, reconquered Granada, the last independent Moorish city-state whose survival for more than two and a half centuries (as subordinate to the Kingdom of Castile according to