Among the more than 150,000 Arabs who emigrated to Brazil after 1870, journalists and writers have come. Based in cities like São Paulo and Rio, they wrote in their native languages - generating a rarely celebrated cultural output. Brazil was even, in the first decades of the twentieth century, one of the intellectual centers of the Arab world. Between 1880 and 1929, there were 95 Arabic newspapers and magazines in Brazil. By comparison, there were 82 publications in Palestine during the same period. Until 1944, this community had already published at least 156 books in Arabic, totaling at least 200,000 copies.
This story will be celebrated this Friday (23) at 5 p.m. at an event organized by Editora Tabla. The cat will have several experts. For example, historian Heloisa Abreu Dib, who coordinates a project to digitize documents from the Syrian-Lebanese community in Brazil. Alberto Sismondini, from the University of Coimbra, who studies Brazilian literature of Arabic origin, will also participate. Researcher and journalist Christina Queiroz and USP professor Michel Sleiman will also be on the table.
Free of charge, the event will be broadcast on the publisher’s YouTube and Facebook and can be viewed at a later date. Founded in 2020, Tabla focuses on translating Arabic literature into Portuguese.