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Salwa Salama Atlas, a Syrian Nationalist in São Paulo
Abstract by Mr. Diogo Bercito On Session IX-22  (Long-Distance Nationalism)

On Thursday, October 15 at 11:00 am

2020 Annual Meeting

Abstract
After migrating from Homs to São Paulo in 1914, Salwa Salama Atlas edited one of the earliest women’s magazines of the Arabic-speaking world, published several anthologies, served as headmistress in an orphanage, and co-founded an influent social club. I argue that, through her activities, Salwa was part of a transnational community that discussed new ideas of family and gender, shaping a new, modern Syria which could achieve its independence from the Ottomans and French. Salwa raised awareness of the plight of widows and single mothers and praised their resilience when facing adversity. She also promoted specific moral codes, such as the obligation of women to fulfill their destinies as mothers of the nation—literally by giving birth to Syrians, but also figuratively by educating them properly. Nevertheless, her name lives only in footnotes, where she is mostly remembered as the wife of the nationalist intellectual Jurj Atlas. Salwa was the victim of three overlapping historical biases: she inhabited the mahjar, lived in the global periphery, and, most importantly, was a woman. For these reasons, scholars paid scant attention to her story. This paper aims to correct these injustices. I analyze a 1932 issue of the magazine al-Karma and the anthologies Amam al-Mawqid and Jarrat al-Manna. With this work, I aim to challenge the frameworks of “methodological nationalism,” meaning those that privilege the nation-state to the detriment of transnational movements. I also frame Salwa’s work as a “long-distance nationalism,” that is, one that happened outside the borders of the imagined nation-state.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Maghreb
Other
Syria
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries