Paratexts and Prize Culture: A Case Study of Contemporary Arab Writing in the Anglophone Market

Description Arab authors seeking an Anglophone readership must negotiate a Eurocentric publishing industry that routinely views literary texts through an ethnographic – and often reductive – lens. My paper explores this through a case study of Raja Shehadeh, an author and human rights lawyer, who is best known for Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007), which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Since Edward Said’s death in 2003, Shehadeh has arguably become the most prominent Palestinian voice in the Anglophone context. The paper examines the influence of the Orwell Prize on Shehadeh’s career by scrutinising how he is presented to an Anglophone readership. It considers a broad range of bibliographical evidence: the packaging of the different editions of the book, press coverage, interviews, reviews, and statements by the Orwell Prize committee. Shehadeh strives to make his work accessible, while also urging his non-Palestinian readership to question prevailing narratives about Palestine and the Middle East. In what ways, then, do paratextual materials acknowledge these distinct objectives? Despite Shehadeh’s award for political writing, the paper argues that this politics is rendered somewhat abstract. Shehadeh’s humanity and, more problematically, his civility and dignity are consistently emphasized, with his work located within a limiting metropolitan vocabulary of literature and the conflict. Shehadeh’s work variously complies with and resists this framing, and consequently the paper asks what his success reveals about Anglophone perceptions of Palestinian and wider Arab writing. Presented at the Bibliographical Society of America Annual Meeting, January 29th, 2021. Sponsored by Les Enluminures.

AudiencesGraduates, Professionals, Scholars, Undergraduates

Access TermsBook industries and trade, Literary prizes, Orientalism

TagsOrwell Prize, BSA Annual Meeting, BSA New Scholars Program