
Dr Sara Forcella - orcid.org/0000-0002-7892-0750
Postdoctoral Fellow, April - June 2024 (previously in residence October 2022 - July 2023)
Home Institution: Sapienza University of Rome
Sara Forcella completed a master’s degree in Arabic language and literature at Sapienza University of Rome and then received her PhD from the same university in 2021, with a thesis entitled “Otherness and the Other Sex Within the Frame-Story of The Thousand and One Nights: Texts and Criticism”. During her doctorate, she spent 15 months at the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies as a visiting student and an active member of its academic community. In her PhD dissertation, Sara undertook a detailed philological analysis to explore representations of masculinity and femininity, as well as male-female interactions, within both the Arabic printed versions and the most famous English translations of the story that opens the worldly-famous medieval Arabic collection. She also investigated the way in which these representations, which are constructed upon different intersectional categories defining the relational boundaries between the selves, have been analysed by the extensive body of literary criticism in English and in Arabic targeting The Thousand and One Nights. At present, Sara is deepening her research into the Arab critical contributions to this work. She is particularly interested in how Orientalist legacies (which are conspicuous in the 19th century printed editions and translations of the collection), Western theoretical perspectives, the discourse on the Arab literary canon, the domestic appraisal of Arabic Classics, and “East-West” reciprocal perceptions are reflected in the global debate around The Thousand and One Nights, and specifically its paradigmatic opening story. She recently published a book chapter entitled The Thousand and One Nights and the Arab Literary Canon between Past and Present: Responses to the Egyptian Censorship in 1985.
Sara is also a practitioner and an activist. She has been working in the field of migrant reception as cultural operator and mediator since 2012, after having refined her Arabic language skills in Tunisia. She has also researched at the academic level on this subject. Today she is the leading member of an Italian non-profit association (Fuori Passo ETS) that offers support and services for people with a background of forced migration.
Project title: Looking inward: a decolonial perspective on the Arab criticism of The Thousand and One Nights
My project intends to expand on the modern Arabic-language critical appraisals of The Thousand and One Nights, as a research area that is omitted from the extensive body of scholarship targeting this work and generally produced within “the cultural system of English” (Mufti 2016, 12). My aim is to analyse Arab views, which are underrepresented in the existing criticism dominated by Western languages and positionalities, in order to focus on their unique characteristics and on how they have communicated with, been influenced by or distanced themselves from Western approaches. I will specifically explore critical responses on representations of femininity and masculinity within the story opening the collection. These readings call into play different issues, among which are: gender representation and roles both in the Arab and non-Arab world; the positioning of The Thousand and One Nights, as a work of middle narrative, within its own literary tradition; the “exogenous canonisation” (Benigni 2011, 134) of the collection due to its popularity in the West and its reintroduction in the Arab canon, and “cultural logics” (Mufti 2016, 19) and foreign influences operating in the “indigenous” reception process. My research will hopefully invite a rethinking of West/European and Arab relationship with The Thousand and One Nights, not so much in light of the already discussed orientalist legacies ̶ Orientalism being the cultural scenario within which the “official” introduction of the Nights was situated ̶ , but in order to explore the modern evolution and forms of these ties. This will contribute to decentre Western, or Anglo-globalist (Arac, 2002), perspectives within the interdisciplinary debate on The Thousand and One Nights, from which both Arabic- as a language of literary analysis - and (the agency of the) Arab critical reception have been largely absent.