This chapter traces an aesthetic shift in realism in Arabic literature through a materialist framework that engages two core concepts: historical context (including social and political changes) and literary form. It explores how the relationship between poetics and politics shapes the transformation of realism in the Arabic novel during very significant moments in Arab history, including the political radicalism of the 1950s, the military defeats in the 1967 war, and the Arab Spring in 2011, showing how realism still responds powerfully to the historical change that the region has been undergoing since 2011. It explores how the realist mode aesthetically captures the stateless Bidun residents of Kuwait in Nasir Al-zafiri’s Al-Sahd (Scorched Heat, 2014) to offer a counter-narrative. Furthermore, it examines the realist representation of state violence, structural marginalization, and the alienation of the constantly changing city of Amman in Jalal Barjas’s Dafatir Alwarraq (The Bookseller’s Notebooks, 2020), emphasizing the contemporary persistence and deepening of realism in Arabic literature.

Lebanese and Syrian immigrant women living in the Americas, or the mahjar, published some of the earliest Arabic novels and women’s journals as part of the nahḍa, or the Arabic literary and cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The cultural hub of this Arabic literary movement in America was New York City’s first Arab immigrant neighborhood, “Little Syria,” located just blocks from what is now known as “Ground Zero.” A consideration of works by diasporic Arab women writers North and South America both 1) reframes the Arab nahḍa as a transnational movement, and 2) expands the definition of what can be considered “American literature.” By shedding light on this neglected archive – and re-inserting Arab women into the wider American historical and literary narratives from which they have long been erased – this essay demonstrates that “Arabs” are in fact an important, yet neglected, part of American history.