Abd al-Massih Haddad (1890-1963) made a name for himself within the Arab diaspora in the United States as the founder and editor of al-Sa'ih, the longest running periodical published in Arabic in America. Meanwhile, he is lesser known for a series of short stories he printed in this periodical and subsequently published as a collection in 1921, named Hikayat al-Mahjar. The collection features thirty-one stories that portray episodes in the lives of a wide cast of Syrian characters who were navigating the challenges of adapting to life in the American Mahjar. While the literature of the American Mahjar is best known for the innovative free verse poetry the likes of which Kahlil Gibran composed, Haddad's more obscure collection offers experimentation within Arabic prose, in both content and form. In fact, Kahlil Gibran himself was so astonished by the realist content of the first story Abd al-Massih Haddad published that he immediately wrote him, encouraging him to continue to develop these illuminating literary portraits of their Syrian community in the American diaspora. Hikayat al-Mahjar was the first collection of short stories, to my knowledge, that depicted the early Arab émigré community in Arabic literature at a time when this community was assimilating into post-World War I America. It must be noted that the collection's focus on the Arab community was in stark contrast to the more popular Mahjar poetry, which tended toward nostalgic depictions and invocations of the homeland. In my paper I will analyze a selection of stories from Haddad's collection and reflect on how this fiction constructs this early Arab émigré community in America. The collection is inclusive, in that the thirty-one stories allow for a plethora of Arab voices, while it is also insular, in that very few American characters are depicted despite the geographical setting of the stories. While the collection may not feature many American characters, it grapples intensely with the challenging process of adapting to, and resisting, America's social, cultural, and ideological landscape. Debates over gender roles, race and ethnicity, and America's individualist ethos permeate this innovative collection and inform the representations of the Arab émigré community in America. I will argue that Haddad's collection of short stories elucidates the contours of this community by centering Arab characters' engagement with, and ambivalence towards, the behaviors, ideas, norms, and symbols they encounter in America.

Iraqi writer Muhsin al-Ramli’s personal experiences as an exile living in Spain inform the themes that he explores in both his long and short fiction. His 1998 collection "Awr?q Ba‘?dah ‘an Dijla" (Papers Far from the Tigris) and other short stories penned by him and published in various newspapers and magazines within the last two decades will be the focus of this paper. These texts repeatedly employ a first-person narrator residing someplace in Spain and writing about his homeland of Iraq. The geographical distance from which these narratives unfold infuses each text with nostalgia and also fragments it, highlighting the divided self. Physically living in Spain but dwelling psychologically in Iraq, the characters exist in a constant state of in-betweenness. They are neither fully here nor there, living instead a shadow existence in Spain defined by feelings of alienation and displacement. Most of al-Ramli’s characters, like the author himself, were forced to leave Iraq in the 1990s for economic or political reasons, or both. The homeland is reconstructed and remapped through the frantic rewriting of its lost geography. But the descriptions of cities, villages, neighborhoods, streets, and even individual shops, restaurants, and cafes pile up densely, resisting the narrators’ efforts to reclaim them. Their pull undermines any effort to live now and develop an identity rooted in the self that is defined by anything but exile. In this paper, I will argue that this divide produces a psychological crisis that alienates al-Ramli’s narrators and characters from both their surroundings and the texts themselves, which represent the lost Iraq. Alienation is manifested through highly experimental narratives that incorporate stream of consciousness, dreams, and nightmares, among other forms. The stories themselves resist linear narratives, as if contesting their telling. It is only in the constant shuttling between Iraq and Spain, between past and present, that al-Ramli and his narrators can imagine home.

The following study examines a widely circulated language learning compilation, entitled both Ahsan al-Nukhab fi Ma‘rifat Lisan al-‘Arab and Traité de la lange arabe vulgaire by Muhammad ‘Ayyad al-Tantawi (1810-1861) who composed it at the height of his career teaching Arabic in St. Petersburg. Ahsan al-nukhab is structured as an atypical rendition of a chrestomathy, a selection of texts of varied genres compiled with the intention of teaching a language. Unlike Silvestre de Sacy’s popular Chrestomathie Arabe (1802, 2nd edition 1826), al-Tantawi included mostly his own writings and sample phrases, rendering his distinctive language the authentic source to be imitated by students. Ahsan al-nukhab received acclaim for its originality and utility in the Orientalist periodicals of the era, even replacing de Sacy’s work at some institutions. I argue that his book constitutes not simply an unprecedented linguistic-lexicographic experiment, but also an avenue for understanding al-Tantawi’s representation of his cultural and literary world in Russia. Born in 1810 in the central Nile Delta, al-Tantawi moved to Cairo as a teenager to study and later teach at al-Azhar, and gave private lessons to Orientalists. At the age of 30, he accepted an invitation from the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs to teach Arabic at the University of St. Petersburg, where he would rise to the highest rank of professor. Ahsan al-nukhab, in its phrases, poems, proverbs, and correspondence, bears the important traces of this movement—from Tanta to the intellectual circles of Cairo, to the banks of the Neva, where he taught his language and culture as both a purportedly authentic shaykh and salaried professor. This study starts by outlining the circumstances of Ahsan al-nukhab’s publication, then moves to a close analysis of the style and structure of the text to bring into focus the larger vision of Arabic literary modernity produced in St. Petersburg and published in Leipzig, 1848.

The works of short fiction that make up "Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations" were solicited by Comma Press in the wake of President Donald Trump’s infamous January 2017 “Muslim ban.” They are by authors representing the seven Muslim-majority, mostly-Arabic-speaking countries included in the original executive order (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). The stated goal of "Banthology" is both to increase understanding of these nations and their people among English-speaking audiences and to provide a creative space for the literary reactions of some of those impacted by the ban. The “Muslim ban” required an imagining of the countries it targeted as “other” than the United States, and yet all the same in fundamental ways. The stories in "Banthology" are counternarratives, offering alternative perspectives and histories. Few address Trump’s executive order directly. Instead, they meander through airports and cities, themes of exile and forced flight, the distant past and even parallel worlds. They create a map with no fixed points or borders. Though these narratives represent seven countries, they explicitly resist any suggestion that they are in some way representative. The authors are of different ages and come from a variety of backgrounds. Some reside in Europe or the United States. They and their short fiction combat the notion of the monolithic other suggested by the ban through the diversity of the perspectives and experiences they offer. Taken as a whole, "Banthology" also embodies the ways in which texts can move where physical bodies cannot. Seven authors from geographically distant countries, writing in three different languages, are put into conversation with each other in a collection spearheaded by a UK press in response to an executive order made by an American president. The project of this anthology is not canonization, but rather the creation of a reality of diversity and movement that challenges the homogeneity suggested by the Muslim ban, as well as the borders it attempts to keep closed.