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More than a century before contemporary debates about Arab American identity, a Lebanese immigrant woman in New York City was championing intercultural dialogue and women's solidarity across cultural divides through the radical medium of the Arabic novel. ʿAfifa Karam (1883-1924) not only wrote groundbreaking fiction; she also theorized the novel as a genre that could empower immigrant women readers at a time when the Arabic novel itself had yet to gain acceptance as a legitimate literary form.
Elizabeth Saylor offers the first comprehensive study of Karam's life and work, recovering a pivotal yet overlooked figure in the nahda, the Arabic cultural renaissance. Drawing on Karam's journalism in the New York-based newspaper al-Huda and her three published novels, Saylor reveals how this writer, journalist, and translator developed a distinctly gendered theory of fiction while addressing the urgent questions facing Syrian immigrants navigating between Arab and American cultures. Karam's novels—Badiʿa wa-Fuʾad, Fatima al-Badawiyya, and Ghadat ʿAmshit—feature heroines who embody hybrid identities, forge unlikely cross-cultural friendships, and resist patriarchal oppression both in their ancestral homeland and their adopted country. Karam emerges as a bold social critic and literary innovator whose work remains strikingly relevant to contemporary discussions of transnational feminism and cultural hybridity.
