Modernity Studies and Syncretism. The Structuralism Approach and Beyond in Muḥammad Bannīs’s Literary Studies

Structuralism occupies a relevant place in contemporary Arab literary criticism, providing new techniques and tools for textual analysis and challenging more con- ventional, content-focused approaches. Since the early 1970s, a remarkable number of Arab scholars—many of them from the Maghrib area—have relied on structural- ist principles and approaches in their studies. The distinguished Moroccan poet and scholar Muḥammad Bannīs (b. 1948) grounded his first major study on contemporary poetry in Morocco (1979) in structuralist theory, yet he applied it with his own syncretic approach. In fact, he relied only in part on structuralist principles for textual analysis while reserving centrality for the socio-historical dimension in his understanding of poetic texts. In a subsequent study on modern Arabic poetry (1989–1991), he examined poetic structures and their transformations within an epistemological framework, looking at the notion of cultural modernity through an expanded geographical horizon and a transhistorical analytic perspective. Through a cross-disciplinary and integrated critical approach to literary research, Bannīs provides a thorough analysis of modern and contemporary Arab and Moroccan poetry by articulating a critique of dominant narratives of modern culture and offering a compelling reading of power relationships between Arab cultural centers and peripheries.