Event overview
The 2026 Annual Lecture of the International Comparative Literature Association, hosted by the Goldsmiths Centre for Comparative Literature
The CCL is delighted to host again the Annual Lecture of the Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée / International Comparative Literature Association (AILC/ICLA), which will be given this year by Professor Nouri Gana (University of California in Los Angeles/UCLA).
In Fī ḥaḍrat al-ghiyāb (In the Presence of Absence, 2006), Darwish asks: “What does it mean for the Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for the poet to be Palestinian?”
This talk takes its cue from this question to reflect on the evolution of Darwish’s entanglement with the question of Palestine. While Darwish has often been read through the lens of national allegory, professor Gana contends that such readings are not merely imposed from without but correspond to a pressure internal to his poetic practice—one that Darwish both inhabits and resists across his oeuvre.
Nouri Gana is Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition to Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham UP, 2023), his most recent book, he is the author of Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Bucknell UP, 2011 & paperback 2015), and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Edinburgh UP, 2013) as well as The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013 & paperback 2015). Mahmoud Darwish and the Predicament of National Allegory, the title of this talk, is also the title of his current book project under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Jul 2026 | 4:00pm |
Accessibility
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