MES presents: Nouri Gana

Nouri Gana, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles

Ben Ali, Dégage: A History of Cultural Dissent in Tunisia, 1934-2011

Narratives explaining the origins of the Tunisian Revolution have focused heavily on the regime’s authoritarianism and socio-economic inequalities. Yet cultural protests in art, literature and cinema contributed to Tunisian critiques of the regime for decades. This talk will begin to address the value of cultural dissent in the long history of Tunisia from colonial to postcolonial times.

Nouri Gana is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Bucknell UP, 2011), and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects and of The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013).

Refreshments to follow.

Sponsored by Executive Education, LLL, the Humanities Center, the English Department and the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.