Project description
Reading your way through countries of the Maghreb
Cultural and religious pluralism will be studied in the three Maghreb North African states – Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. The EU-funded TRANSECT project will explore how national and regional identity in the three States (which were encompassed by the French colonial project) has been reconstructed into multi-faceted paradigms, codes and modes of literary production. The project will focus on a homogeneous corpus of selected award-winning novels from 2009 to 2020, which are all centred around the themes of inter- and intra-religious dialogue, peaceful coexistence and pluralism in the Maghreb. The project will investigate how these novels address national issues and how they contribute to repositioning the image of the Maghreb within the Arab region.
Objective
TRANSECT is a research project aiming to explore how the cultural and religious pluralism of the Maghreb is represented in the contemporary Maghrebi novel in Arabic and disseminated globally by means of the International Prize of Arabic Fiction (IPAF). The definition of Maghreb adopted by TRANSECT is a restricted one, only including Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, the three States which were encompassed by the French colonial project.
TRANSECT aims to explore the ways in which the national and regional identity of the Maghrebi countries has been re-constructed into multi-faceted paradigms, codes and modes of literary production. The scope of the research has been narrowed to a coherent and homogeneous corpus of selected novels drawn from the longlists of the IPAF from 2009 to 2020. The common thread of interest among these novels is both geographic and thematic, since they are all centred around the themes of inter- and intra-religious dialogue, peaceful coexistence and pluralism in the Maghreb. TRANSECT addresses two clusters of questions:
1) Which idea of the Maghreb is shaped by the novels longlisted at IPAF and sold by Abu Dhabi? How is this “Maghreb pluriel” appropriated and marketed by the Emirati cultural policymakers? Which purposes of cultural diplomacy does it serve?
2) To what extent and how do these novels address national issues before aspiring to become pieces of World literature? How do they contribute to reposition the image of the Maghreb within the Arab region? How does this literature dialogue with national reconciliation processes, contributing to cultural peacebuilding through the construction of a non-exclusionary national identity?
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
00185 Roma
Italy