Spanish American Arab Literature

Abstract

In the mid-1800s various historical circumstances in the Ottoman province of Greater Syria including economic changes, religious tensions, and the shift from Ottoman to European control produced a large-scale Levantine (Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian) migration movement that took many Levantine Arabic-speakers to Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and neighboring countries. This immigration wave and subsequent ones between the Middle East and Spanish America gave rise to a body of literature that can be referred to as Spanish American Arab literature. These immigrants and their descendants, known as turcos—“Turks”—because they arrived from the Ottoman Empire, were mostly Christians of various Middle Eastern churches, but some were Muslims, Druze, or Jews. They typically sought their livelihood through commerce and the Christian immigrants used religious affinity with the Hispanic world as a vehicle for assimilation. Nonetheless, some of these immigrants did pursue interests in the world of letters and often consciously crafted an Arab émigré identity through their writings, whether in Arabic or in Spanish. The early writers who were publishing in Arabic formed associations to support their Arabic literary enterprise and published in Middle East–based periodicals while also establishing local Arabic-language or bilingual periodicals, in order to secure publication venues. Perhaps because many of these writers worked in journalism, in both earlier and later periods historical and cultural essays have been a prominent genre among Arab Spanish Americans. Although most of the Latin American mahjar poets (or émigré poets) were more traditionalist in views and in poetic style than their brethren who settled in North America, some did participate in poetic innovation. In prose, in addition to a few plays, autobiographies, and book-length essays, émigré writers in Argentina produced early attempts at Arabic novels. Regardless of genre, these early writers participated in significant ways in the cultural and political aspects of either Arab nationalist movements or pan-Arabism. In order to engage with the cultures surrounding them, Arab immigrant writers and their descendants soon turned to writing and publishing in Spanish, across various genres. Many of these writers continue to address, whether directly or indirectly, Arab identity and broader conceptions of diaspora and uprootedness. Regardless of these émigré writers’ language of expression, language in relation to identity and the representation of the immigrant or ethnic experience is a key motif in Spanish American Arab literature. Given that the Southern Cone and Brazil received more Arabic-speaking immigrants, more research has been done on these regions. Although Brazil is the site of rich Arab diaspora cultural production, those works do not fit within the scope of this bibliography. With time, researchers may unearth more primary texts from other regions in Spanish America and hopefully continued scholarly work on all of these regions will further our knowledge about Arab literary production in Spanish America.