Postcolonial studies may not have paid much attention to Arabic literature despite the ongoing projects of imperialism and Zionism in the Arab world and despite the rich contributions of Arabic literary criticism in the 1950s and 1960s to what Ghassan Kanafani called "Resistance Literature" (or adab al-muq?wma), not to mention the many vibrant debates that took place at the time around the literature of commitment (or adab al-iltiz?m); similarly Arabic literary studies may not have been particularly enthused about postcolonial theory despite the revelatory powers of Said's Orientalism and despite the many relevant insights of the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective to the kind of archival research that ought to be done in the Arab world. Yet, notwithstanding the history and particular dynamics of this variably mutual neglect, it is oftentimes the case that the two fields are summarily lumped together and identified as the stealth academic enemy par excellence-indeed, the assault on postcolonial studies in the US academy in the wake of 9/11 went hand-in-hand with the assault on Arabic language and literature, not to mention the relentless assault on Islam that has been going on for quite some time. Now that the two fields are ripe for mutual engagement-especially with the ever increasing popularity in Arabic literary and academic circles of such words as "orientalism," "post-colonialism," and "subaltern" as well as the gradual prominence of Arabic literature in translation in postcolonial and comparative literary scholarship-it is high time that we stressed not only areas of confluence but also horizons of transnational solidarity. This paper seeks to do both: (1) to discern the psycho-affective dynamics of Arabic literary production and (2) to ponder the precarious rhetorical modes of its critical intervention in a culture continually strained to its breaking point. Postcolonial Arabic literature per-forms, I argue, a series of psycho-affective reckonings with colonial modernity, postcolonial colonialism, and the task of decolonial critique. In this sense, Arabic literature from the Naksa to the Arab Spring/Winter contributes an affective politics of resistance (I call "melancholy acts") to postcolonial theory.