In 1897, Lebanese Maronite ‘Afifa Karam (1883-1924) arrived in America as a bride of fourteen. Eight years later, she would emerge as the first Arab American woman journalist and novelist, and one of the first Arab novelists of either sex or any nationality. Karam’s Arabic writings, published in New York City’s “Little Syria” in the first decade of the 20th century, were addressed primarily to her Syrian immigrant “sisters.” Having lived in both Lebanon and the United States, Karam’s novels offered her readers useful insight about how to navigate life in America, exploring women’s issues through a comparative lens. In her works, the author articulated a bold proto-feminist politics and poetics, highlighting what she saw as the primary sources of women’s oppression in both Arab and American societies. Published in the most influential Arabic-language newspaper of the day, Karam considered her serialized fiction as a powerful platform for civic education and change and she used the actions and fate of her characters to illustrate her points. This paper will explore one particular facet of Karam’s fiction, namely the intimate bonds between her women characters. In each of her three novels, Badi‘a wa Fu’ad (Badi’a and Fu’ad, 1906), Fatima al-Badawiyya (Fatima the Bedouin, 1908), and Ghadat ‘Amshit (The Girl from Amshit, 1910), it is the heroine’s relationship to another woman that sustains and ultimately saves her. In this surprising twist on the traditional romance, it is the love between women that dominates the narrative space of her novels. By demonstrating that women can indeed exist outside of their relationships with men, Karam creates an alternative model of gender relations, while simultaneously exploring the complex intersections of gender, class, religion, and race within the first Arab immigrant community in the United States. Despite the fact that Karam’s novels emerged well before the novel was accepted as a canonical genre of Arabic literature, she has not been acknowledged as an important contributor to the evolution of modern Arabic fiction. I argue that because was a woman, writing inaugural Arabic fiction, in the mahjar, Karam has been triply marginalized. As the first full-length study of this pioneering Arab woman writer, this research strives to broaden our understanding of the scope of Arabic cultural production at the turn of the twentieth century.

This paper explores how the figure of Scheherazade from The Thousand and One Nights is appropriated, reconfigured, and creatively subverted in the works of Arab American women writers such as Mohja Kahf (Emails from Scheherazad), Susan Muaddi Darraj (Scheherazade’s Legacy), and Alia Yunis (“My Arabian Superheroine” and The Night Counter). In analyzing the contrasting ways in which each of these writers reimagines the figure of Scheherazade in her work, this paper argues that Scheherazade occupies a productive if problematic site for negotiating Arab American literary interventions within Arab and American contexts. As the quintessential model of female agency within a highly mobile cross-cultural text that has undergone multiple recensions and translations by both Arab storytellers and European translators over several centuries, Scheherazade occupies a contested, multilayered cross-cultural site of representation that foregrounds the relationships between power, sexuality, narration, and cultural geography. As such, Scheherazade offers Arab American women writers a risky avenue of access for negotiating their literary presence amidst gendered, national, linguistic, and transnational flows of cultural production. In examining how various Arab American women writers reconstruct the figure of Scheherazade, this paper also situates their efforts within the contested spaces of Middle East studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and world literature studies. In so doing, it draws on the work of Ella Shohat, who views Arab American studies not only “in relation to both ethnic studies and area studies,” but also as “transcend[ing] a nation-state analytical framework” (46). It also responds to Wai Chee Dimock’s call for viewing American literature as “a complex tangle of relations … better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures” (3). This paper thus highlights the ways in which such reconfigurations participate in a process of redefinition that not only reclaims Arab women’s agency within American contexts but also redefines the spaces of literary production and transnational flows of cultural exchange within, among, and between gendered, national, linguistic, and academic boundaries of the Arab world and the United States. References Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Shohat, Ella. "The Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism." Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Eds. Alsultany, Evelyn and Ella Shohat. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2013. 42-62.

Recent discussions of gender and sexuality pertaining to representations of Arabs and Arab-Americans have obsessively focused on what Susan Muaddi Darraj has described as "the Faceless Veiled Women." Numerous feminist and postcolonial scholars have tackled the problematic simplification of complex political and religious identities that such stilted representations help produce. Yet in deconstructing the “saving brown women from brown men” narrative, the figure of the Arab, Muslim man remains under-theorized. My paper reads the figure of the Arab and Muslim man against the grain of dominant US narratives that deploy racial, sexual, and religious stereotypes (terrorists, fundamentalists, uncivilized, sexual pervert, etc.) to depict Arab and Muslim men as “unsettling figures to the American sensibility” (Elmaz Abinader). To do so, I map the development of a counter-hegemonic discourse in novels by Arab-American women writers that releases the Arab and/or Muslim man from the role of the threatening oppressor. To investigate such discourse and the intersections of race, sexuality, national origin, religion, and politics in constructions and re-constructions of Arab and Arab-American masculinities, I analyze Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan (2003), Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2008), and Alicia Erian’s Towelhead (2005).

Mohja Kahf’s 2006 novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, charts the personal development of Khadra Shamy, a Muslim American girl struggling with what it means to be a Muslim American woman. As Khadra navigates her evolving world she must come to terms with her intersected identities: woman, Muslim, American, Arab, immigrant. This paper focuses specifically on the functions of Khadra’s code-switching between English and Arabic, as well as her shifts within English dialects, at crucial moments of self-development and self-definition within the novel. As a young woman, Khadra is challenged to repeatedly reinvent herself in response to the disparate communities in which she exists. Playing an astute linguistic game, she slides in and out of Arabic, Standard English, and heavily inflected Midwestern English depending on her interlocutor and how she wishes to portray herself. In moments of crisis, however, Khadra’s control over her various codes breaks down, and she often takes refuge in a language the other speakers won’t understand. She uses this defense mechanism most notably when her identity as a woman and a Muslim are in conflict: when her conservative Muslim fiancé suggests nine children, she spontaneously reasserts her agency in the situation by responding emphatically with a Midwestern “Nuh-uh!” that he doesn’t understand. This rhetorical move suddenly positions him as an outsider to what is taking place within the conversation, and leaves him no choice but to ask her what “nuh-uh” means if he wishes to reenter the dialogue. In scholarly examinations of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf—a novel that is rich with challenges to assumptions about Arab Americans and Muslim Americans—the subtleness of the language often goes overlooked. Using literary criticism paired with sociolinguistic theory to analyze moments of contested power, I suggest that Khadra practices a shrewd subversion of biased power dynamics, using language to reassert herself as an equal in the face of oppression.