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Refashioning Gender in the Southern Mahjar Press
Abstract
In the early-twentieth century, Brazil boasted the highest number of Arabic periodicals published outside of the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, the "Southern Mahjar," which refers to the South American countries to which people from the Greater Syria area immigrated throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, should be considered a crucial node in any mapping of a global Middle East. Arab migration to Brazil inspired cultural production that crossed genres (e.g. poetry, plays novels, autobiographies) and languages (e.g. Portuguese and Arabic). Newspapers and magazines played an especially important role in the burgeoning cultural sphere created by Arabs in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. The proliferation of Arabic periodicals that is commonly associated with the Nahdah (Arab Renaissance) in cities like Beirut and Cairo was also alive and well in Southern Mahjar cities like São Paulo. While research on cultural production in the Southern Mahjar is beginning to gain more critical attention, the lack of primary and secondary sources that focus specifically on Southern Mahjar women during this period has led to a gap in the scholarship. This has left us with narratives centered on historical accounts of male peddlers and merchants, as well as cultural accounts of a press seemingly written by and for men. This paper aims to address this gap through an interdisciplinary exploration of Syrian immigrant Salwa Salamah Atlas's magazine al-Karmah (The Vine), which was published in São Paulo between 1914 and 1948 and enjoyed a wide transnational circulation. The magazine, which was also occasionally published in Portuguese, was the first and one of the only magazines to explicitly address itself to Arab women in Brazil. Covering topics that ranged from poetry to politics to fashion, the magazine attests to Arab women's important contributions to the Southern Mahjar press. At times reinforcing circumscribed gender roles through disciplining paradigms, while at other times contesting them through humor and alternative imaginings, the magazine demonstrates how writers were able to "refashion" articulations of gender to meet the shifting needs of their diasporic context. It also features unique articulations of south-south solidarities with women's struggles across the globe, thus serving as a dynamic historical testament to the "The Global Middle East" theme of this conference.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Comparative