My research falls within the sphere of sociology of literature, building on the foundations laid by scholars such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002) and, in particular, their elaboration on the concept of culture industries; Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1996) and his understanding of literature as a field; Pascale Casanova (2004) with her centre-periphery model, which has lately been challenged by the emergence of new poles of literary consecration; Franco Moretti (2005, 2013), who has insisted on the necessity a criticism based on the practice of distant reading, and others. To them, I add other scholars who studied more specifically literary prizes, cultural institutions and the politics of postcolonialism, such as James English (2005), Sandra Ponzanesi (2014), Sarah Brouillette (2014 and others), Gisèle Sapiro (2009 and others), Claire Squires (2007) and others.
In the field of Arabic studies, sociology of literature is not a very common approach. However, among the scholars adopting it, I can mention Richard Jacquemond (2008), Samia Mehrez (2008), Felix Lang (2016), Tristan Leperlier (2018), and Jacquemond and Lang (2019). Recently, a PhD research on pan-Arab literary prizes appeared (Katia Al Tawil, Les prix littéraires panarabes décernés au roman arabe: normes, mécanismes et impacts, 2022).
In order not to overlook completely the formal aspects of literature, nonetheless, my research takes in consideration the textual dimension by attempting to understand how literary prizes (and the IPAF in particular) affect the genre, style and content of the Arabic novel in the Maghreb. According to some scholars, in fact, materialist approaches tend to overlook the texts themselves, reducing them to irrelevant accidents. For example, Anne-Marie McManus argues that “prizes are often studied from materialist and sociological perspectives that tend to marginalize their textual reading”. McManus called for the necessity of “reading with the IPAF”, namely addressing texts both “as representational objects and commodities”. According to McManus, the novels awarded with or long- and shortlisted at the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (from now onwards, IPAF) must be read as national narratives that experience a different “afterlife” once the participation in the IPAF pushes them into the realm of world literature through their English translation. These novels go through a process of “deterritorialization”, though, that does not erase their national scale and local relevance. Between this two poles – national and global – lays a layered network of interconnected modes of circulation. As Felix Lang claims, “the Arab field of cultural production is a quintessentially transnational space” and it comes as “a very decentralized field whose major institutions are distributed over a number of nation-states and even continents”.
The potential users of my project results range from Italian and European publishing houses to cultural organisations and projects focusing on the Arabic book industry, and EU policy makers. After the end of my fellowship I will certainly try to put the results of my work at the service of new scouting and translation projects, which would be utterly beneficial since the Arabic-Italian translation sector in Italy suffers from several weaknesses (amateur translators, insufficient funding, limited ability of scouting, lack of comprehensive vision and planning, small or amatorial publishers that do not have sufficient capacity of promotion and distribution, etc.) that I would be able to address and contribute to correct through my work.
