More than a century before contemporary debates about Arab American identity, a Lebanese immigrant woman in New York City was championing intercultural dialogue and women’s solidarity across cultural divides through the radical medium of the Arabic novel. ʿAfifa Karam (1883–1924) not only wrote groundbreaking fiction; she also theorized the novel as a genre that could empower immigrant women readers at a time when the Arabic novel itself had yet to gain acceptance as a legitimate literary form.Elizabeth Saylor offers the first comprehensive study of Karam’s life and work, recovering a pivotal yet overlooked figure in the nahda, the Arabic cultural renaissance. Drawing on Karam’s journalism in the New York-based newspaper al-Huda and her three published novels, Saylor reveals how this writer, journalist, and translator developed a distinctly gendered theory of fiction while addressing the urgent questions facing Syrian immigrants navigating between Arab and American cultures. Karam’s novels—Badiʿa wa-Fuʾad, Fatima al-Badawiyya, and Ghadat ʿAmshit—feature heroines who embody hybrid identities, forge unlikely cross-cultural friendships, and resist patriarchal oppression both in their ancestral homeland and their adopted country. Karam emerges as a bold social critic and literary innovator whose work remains strikingly relevant to contemporary discussions of transnational feminism and cultural hybridity.
