How has Mahjar literature been received by Arab and Western scholars and critics over the years? How can we understand or explain the place/position of Mahjar literature within the wider Arabic literary sphere? How could closer examination of Mahjar literature – through the various lenses of transnationalism – reframe, expand, or even transform our understanding of Arabic literature more broadly?
This panel will investigate literary and critical works from, and about, the Mahjar, by considering how concepts emerging from the study of transnationalism can be utilized to interrogate and contest understandings of this literary corpus. Recent historical and literary scholarship on the Mahjar continues to expand out from urban centers, offering a deeper and more dynamic understanding of the Arab experience not only across the Americas, but also throughout the world. Stories of migrations, connections, and settling across vast territorial expanses that traverse both national and international borders are unearthing new narratives, subjectivities, and experiences. The very lives of Mahjar authors, and their creative works, attest to the dynamic movement between centers and peripheries, across borders, and into zones of multilingualism and interethnic contact. In this panel we seek to explore the intricacies of literary works and biographical case studies, while reflecting on larger debates pertinent to the study of Mahjar literature.
The papers that make up this panel are unified in their focus on Mahjar literature, but each takes a unique approach in framing this object of study. One paper will consider Mahjar literature’s role as part of the Arab Nahda, thereby foregrounding the transnational character of the Nahda, while also focusing on lesser known Arab women authors who wrote and moved across borders. A second paper will study the role of the prominent Mahjar author Mikhail Naimy in constructing a social imaginary of emigration that included complex and nuanced conceptions of home, Russia, and North America. A third paper will overlap with Naimy, but the scholarly lens of this third paper shifts to a commentary on the multilingualism of Naimy by focusing on his works in Russian, and the memories of Russia that followed him to the Americas. A fourth paper will approach the Mahjar through contemporary Arabic fiction, analyzing a recent novel by Rashid al-Daif that depicts characters emigrating to North America, and, in doing so, contests the meanings of the North American Mahjar for a contemporary audience.
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Benjamin Smith
The study of Mahjar literature across the Americas has historically coalesced around the literary output emerging from urban centers. Cities like New York City, São Paolo, and Buenos Aires anchored early Arab literary communities who often gravitated towards the Arabic-language press. Despite this anchoring, incoming populations of Arab émigrés were on the move, whether across national borders, or within national boundaries. A focus on patterns of movement after migration to the Americas itself raises new questions for scholars of this literature, who have paid increased attention of late to émigrés' transnational connections, border crossings, and experiences moving outside of urban nodes. In the United States alone, historian Sarah Gualtieri’s work suggests a refocus of attention away from New York City, and towards intra-American migrations.
This paper will focus on transnational currents at play in the North American Mahjar through a more contemporary literary reimagining of this place and time. Tablit al-Bahr (2003) by the Lebanese author Rashid al-Daif is a work of historical fiction that stages a classic emigration pattern from the Lebanese Mountains, through Marseille, and then to New York City. This classic pattern then expands, as the protagonist continues on to St. Louis and its rural environs, and spends time in Cuba, where he meets a Chinese immigrant who he later marries. This contemporary work of historical fiction, in reimagining the experience of Arab emigration also contests common tropes of Mahjar history, paralleling Gualtieri’s historical work in foregrounding intra-American migrations, not to mention inter-ethnic contact zones. This paper will analyze how this contemporary Lebanese novel challenges established literary and historical motifs of the Mahjar, while also standing at a historical distance from its object of reimagination, thereby more broadly reassessing this formative period of Modern Arabic Literature.
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Dr. Elizabeth Saylor
Mahjar literature – and particularly the writing of women in the mahjar – cannot be fully understood from within the narrow confines of national borders. Like the individual migrants themselves, mahjar literature traveled. Theirs was a “world in motion” (FN 1) that reflected the transnational and multilingual character of the Arab world during the nah?a, or Arabic literary enlightenment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
During this period, readers and writers of Arabic literature and journalism interacted in the vast geographic and textual “spaces” opened up by the rapidly expanding print culture of the Arabic-speaking world. In their published works, Karam and her literary “sisters” – both Christian and Muslim – on four continents wrestled with a host of ideas, including marriage customs, women’s roles in society, education, the Arabic language, and the politics of westernization in the Arab-Islamic world, and they did so using newly emerging literary forms and styles.
For example, while the works of Levantine immigrant writer ‘Af?fa Karam (1883-1924) were originally published in New York, her work was being republished across the Atlantic, in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. In 1913, when Karam founded her women’s periodical Majallat al-‘?lam al-jad?d al-nis?’iyya (The New Women’s World) in New York, she described it as the “literary daughter” of Fat?t al-sharq (Young Woman of the East), a newspaper founded several years earlier by the Cairo-based Levantine woman writer, Lab?ba H?shim (1882-1952).
A consideration of little known works by diasporic Arab women writers in North and South America at the first half of the twentieth century reveals a dynamic web of connections – both literal and textual – linking women writers throughout the mahjar and beyond. This paper will investigate this neglected body of work in order to piece together the unfinished tapestry of a transnational feminist genealogy of Arab women writers during the nah?a.
1. Arjun Appadurai. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Richard G. Fox, Ed. Recapturing Anthropology. (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 61.
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Mikhail Naimy left his Mount Lebanon home in 1912 to travel to the United States, where he attended college and went on to live for fifteen years. The experience of growing up in a Lebanese culture deeply affected by emigration, of leaving home himself, and of living in the West for two decades had a profound influence on Naimy. That influence informs both his non-fiction writing—particularly his monumental autobiography, Sab??n—as well as many of his works of fiction.
The narrative of emigration that emerges from Naimy’s writing is nuanced and wide-ranging. It contends with both the popular American conception of a hospitable land opening its “golden door” to “huddled masses” of “tired,” “poor,” and “wretched” immigrants, as described in Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” installed at the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. Just as important, Naimy’s vision also contests any Lebanese notion of the U.S. as a land with gold-paved streets from which emigrants could return home with New-World riches. Instead, Naimy’s writings offers a complicated and far less romanticized experience of emigration—and one which sounds provocative notes of caution to Arabs seeking to leave home.
As one of the most celebrated authors of his era, Naimy helped shape the imaginary of emigration/immigration for generations of Lebanese and other Arabs. This paper, drawing on research from the field of migration studies, the study of social imaginaries, and diasporic literary studies, explores the many ways Naimy addressed emigration both as a theme in his fiction and as an important topic in his non-fiction. It aims to add to our understanding of how Mahjar experience influenced wider Arab thought in the twentieth century.
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Dr. Maria Swanson
While the Russian influence on the Arab modernist writer Mikha'il Nu’aymah, who was one of the founders of the Pen League in New York, has long been recognized, scholars have not yet grappled with this author’s Russian writings. Only a handful of scholars have studied the Russian influence on the representatives of The Pen League in depth (Bell, Hine, Scoville, Swanson; Gould) in addition to Soviet era studies (Bilyk, Imanqulieva, Dolinina, Krachkovskii, Muminov).
Yet the material evidence of Russian influence is substantial, and the case studies analyzed in this presentation are notable for Nu’aymah’s engagement with the Russian literary tradition.
My presentation also shows how the Russian poetry produced by late nahda writers helped in developing our understanding of the role of multilingualism in constituting Arabic modernism while illuminating its geographically and linguistically diverse substance.This multilingual poetry can be used as the basis for a deeper study of nahda multilingualism and help in understanding how the traditions that shape poems written in one language were transferred to those written in another one.
My study helps us to better understand the development of the modern Arabic literature, as it gradually absorbed new values, ethics, genres, themes, literary methods, and currents from world literature through what Bakhtin called the “dialogue” of cultures. More broadly, I discuss the phenomenon of multilingual Arabic-Russian-English poets as the one of exophonic literary consciousness (Suga). In focusing on the second juncture in Nu’aymah’s literary trajectories, I show how his Russian experience shaped his subsequent literary production in Arabic.
