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Nouri Gana's Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World begins with a consideration of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in 2010, which precipitated the Tunisian Revolution and Arab Spring, and the suicide of poet Khalil Hawi in Lebanon, an act of protest against the 1982 Israeli invasion. Gana understands these two events, decades and countries apart, as melancholy acts stemming from a collective melancholic disposition and a shared experience of despair in the face of the postcolonial crises in the Arab world. Underscoring this tendency toward melancholy, Gana argues, is the ubiquity of the sense of defeat following the Naksa,1 or the defeat of Arab armies by Israel in 1967, combined as well with the trauma of the 1948 Nakba. Though Gana foregrounds, as do many Middle Eastern scholars, the legacy of the Naksa on the pervasive sense of defeat in Arab cultural production, one might look to the concept of the Nakba as ongoing – as the unique, continuous mode of Israeli settler-colonial expansion and genocide2 – for an even broader interpretation of the historical context behind such melancholy acts. This latter consideration could perhaps address certain melancholy acts of non-Arabs in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, such as the self-immolation of former US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell in February 2024 in protest of the USA's complicity with the genocide in Gaza, while remaining geopolitically specific to the machinations of permanent war and ongoing Nakba in the Arab world and Palestine.
For Gana, melancholy acts such as Bouazizi's and Hawi's signal the Naksa's enduring legacy of defeat. Never properly grieved nor mourned – an impossibility given the continued hegemony of Zionism and imperialism – the haunting of the Naksa is made clear in the melancholy acts of individuals and representations in cultural production. Contra Slavoj Žižek, Gana contends that melancholia specifically in the Arab world is not something t