A Bridge Too Soon: ?Afifa Karam and the Arabic Novel in the United States

More than a century before contemporary debates about Arab American identity, a Lebanese immigrant woman living in Shreveport, Louisiana, was championing intercultural dialogue and women's solidarity across cultural divides through the radical medium of the Arabic novel. ?Afifa 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 articles 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--Badi?a wa-Fu?ad, Fatima al-Badawiyya, and Ghadat ?Amshit--feature heroines who embody hybrid identities, forge unlikely cross-cultural friendships, and resist patriarchal oppression in both 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.

Author: Elizabeth Claire Saylor
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 09/16/2026
Series: Critical Arab American Studies
Pages: 244
Weight: 1.06lbs
Size: 9.08h x 6.36w x 0.82d
ISBN: 9780815612193