This panel takes inspiration from the 2025 MLA Convention Presidential Theme “Visibility” to examine how Arab cultural personages, texts, and histories become visible in the public and scholarly spaces of 20^th- and 21^st-century world culture. In organizing a panel around this topic, we aim to follow through on the Global Arab and Arab American Forum’s commitment to highlighting the globality of Arab/ic literature and culture in the contemporary era, in which it does only originate in the Arabic-speaking Middle East but is also produced and disseminated by authors, artists, filmmakers, poets, journalists, and others in the diaspora working across multiple languages. In this regard, like the panels that our Forum has sponsored at previous Conventions, this panel resists narrowly siloed notions of culture and literature as delimited by national, regional, or linguistic borders, and embraces capacious definitions of both that account for the transnational or global scale at which culture and literature exist today.

As conceptualized by this panel, the potential coming-to-visibility of Arab cultural producers and Arabic cultural products in world culture proceeds through two related mechanisms: on the one hand, through the translation of Arabic-language literary works into English; and on the other, through archival research that reveals Arab culture as always already imbricated in global culture, history, and politics. In the first paper, Daniel Behar examines a high modernist anthology published in 1944 under the editorship of English critic Herbert Howarth and Egyptian poet Ibrahim Shukrallah that renders traditional Arabic poetic forms in the idiom of Anglo-American modernism.. Despite the anti-Orientalist objectives of the project, facilitated by an optimistic sense of a postcolonial moment in which new ties could be forged between the Egyptian and English intelligentsia, the contemporaneous modernist Arabic poetic sensibility that inflected the anthology’s source material is all but erased in the published version.

In the second paper, Nada Ayad investigates the 1986 English translation of a memoir by the pioneering Egyptian feminist Huda Sha‘arawi alongside the 2014 English translation of Egyptian academic Mona Prince’s memoir of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings in Egypt. While the former translation interpolates forty-one photographic images not included in the original Arabic version of the book, the latter translation omits vernacular images taken on the author’s cellphone that accompany each chapter in the Arabic text. The paper asks what the addition or omission of images in such translations of Egyptian women’s writing for Anglophone audiences undermines, validates, interrupts, or corroborates vis-à-vis the Arabic source text, in light of the voracious demand for images of Arab women in the Global North and the long history of asymmetrical cultural exchanges between Arab societies and the Anglo-American literary field.

If the papers in the first half of the panel thematize translation as a possible yet vexed means through which Arabic cultural products reach world audiences, the papers in the second half of the panel make a claim for recognizing Arab culture as a participant in world culture through the recuperation of lost or marginal Arabic historical texts and narratives. In the third paper, Zaina Ujayli identifies a network of Syrian female writers whose work appeared in global periodicals distributed across the Middle East and the Americas, from Cairo to the U.S. Midwest to Brazil. Excluded from scholarship on Arab women’s writing that circulated more strictly within Arab societies, these Syrian women and their work tell a larger story about how women in general participated in the formation of global diasporic identities during the 20^th century.

In the fourth paper, Pasquale Macaluso examines prose literary texts on the Palestinian anticolonial struggle originally published in the mid- to late 1930s and recovered recently from diplomatic archives, libraries, and newspaper collections. Adopting a nationalist stance against the accelerating colonial conquest of Palestine, these works address both the nation and the colonizers to reject the latter’s claim of the inferiority of the colonized people, while also trying to prove that the former’s ability to resist stems from their indigenous culture and religion. At once firmly rooted in their Palestinian context of nearly a hundred years ago and speaking to the ongoing struggles of colonized peoples in the decades since, these texts present Palestine as always already relevant for world history.

Panelists represent a range of viewpoints, geographic origins (both U.S. and international), and statuses within the profession (tenured and untenured faculty and a graduate student). Each panelist will have maximum 10-12 minutes to speak, leaving approximately 25 minutes for discussion at the end of the session.