Eyes on the prize: the global readability of an IPAF-winning modern Arabic novel

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) on the global circulation and reception of modern Arabic literature through a case study of the 2013 IPAF-winning novel Sāq al-bāmbū by Kuwaiti writer Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī (b. 1981). It examines how three versions of Sāq al-bāmbū—the original Arabic novel, the English translation, and an abridged Arabic text designed for Anglophone students of Arabic—become readable in the global literary field through their overlapping iterations of an internationalism that is at once discursive and material. Taking Sāq al-bāmbū as exemplary of a type of Arabic prize novel that has emerged in an era of proliferating Arabic literary prizes, this article argues that the network of readers and reading practices that this text configures around itself on a global level poses a non-Eurocentric alternative to the world literary system as it has been theorized in the Western academy.