Critical Arab American Studies A Bridge Too Soon: ?Afifa Karam and the Arabic Novel in the United States, (Hardcover)

<p>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. ?Afifa 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. </p><p>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 <i>al-Huda</i> 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--<i>Badi?a wa-Fu?ad, Fatima al-Badawiyya, and Ghadat ?Amshit</i>--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.</p>

• Critical Arab American Studies A Bridge Too Soon: ?Afifa Karam and the Arabic Novel in the United States, (Hardcover)
• Author: Elizabeth Claire Saylor
• ISBN: 9780815612193
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2026-09-16
• Page Count: 244