Migration, literature and the nation: Mahjar literature in Brazil

Arab immigrants in Brazil established a thriving Arabic and Portuguese-language literary culture in cities such as Sao Paulo at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Their writing ponders issues such as identity, cultural heritage and belonging to multiple nations. While striving to integrate themselves into the Brazilian milieu, these immigrants also maintained and enriched their ties to their original homelands. This resulted in a cultural identity characterized by hybridity and transnationalism. In "southern mahjar literature" (as all Arabic-language writing in South America is known) the Arab cultural heritage is revived and refashioned to help address a new socio-cultural reality. Arab authors in Brazil also rewrote dominant narratives of their host nation by leading men of letters such as Machado de Assis, Olavo Bilac and Gilberto Freyre.;This dissertation examines the ties between nation and narration while emphasizing the case of Arab writers in Brazil. Specifically, it analyzes the discourse of Brazilian nation-building that emerged during the peak period of immigration there, discusses the Arab response to this discourse over time and, finally, undertakes a close reading of Milton Hatoum's famous rewriting of the nation in Dois irmaos (The Brothers).;The study of a phenomenon such as mahjar literature in Brazil requires a departure from traditional approaches to literary and area studies in the United States. Comparative Arabic and Portuguese literary studies are almost nonexistent, while area studies programs privilege the study of distinct geographic regions over the often-extensive ties between them. Mahjar literature also provides an alternative framework with which to analyze intercultural relations that transcends the prevalent but incomplete paradigms of East-West, North-South, industrialized nations-developing nations, and colonizer-colonized.