Articles and Book Chapters by Elizabeth M Holt
Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures, 2023
Ghassān Kanafānī attended the 1966 Beijing meeting of the AAWB, and the 1967 Beirut meeting of th... more Ghassān Kanafānī attended the 1966 Beijing meeting of the AAWB, and the 1967 Beirut meeting of the AAWA. In a footnote to his study of the author, Stefan Wild records that Kanafānī was left in tears at the Beijing conference when a North Vietnamese poet concluded his discussion of Afro-Asian literature with “shrapnel souvenirs from an American plane that had been shot down the week before” (Wild 1975: 17), registering the poetic power of American shrapnel in a time of Maoist-inspired national liberation struggles. At the Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association, held in March 1967 in Beirut, Kanafānī responded, spanning the Sino-Soviet split and offering writers of the decolonizing Global South his response to American shrapnel as poetry: his theory of “Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine,” distributed under Soviet auspices in the second 1968 issue of the AAWA’s Afro-Asian Writings (later Lotus). A deeply Maoist study that never utters Mao’s name, it centers the role of the peasantry in the revolution, the centrality of popular poetry and orality to the national resistance, and the conditions of cultural siege productive of these literary operations.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022
This article reads Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s 1861 translation of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe in... more This article reads Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s 1861 translation of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe into Arabic in Beirut alongside Karl Marx's contemporaneous critique of the popularity of Robinsonades among British political economists. Al-Bustānī’s translation of Robinson Crusoe sought to synch Arabic up with a global age of double-column bookkeeping, the telegraph, the steamship, and the newspaper, and in turn supplant the Indian Ocean stories of Sindbad the Sailor among Beirut's merchants. The latter story cycle constitutes Arabic literary capital appropriated, enumerated, and rendered exchangeable by the new novel form in the serialized English press of the mercantilist era. In Capital, Vol. 1, in the chapter “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx represents Robinson not as a well-armed slave trader, but rather as endowed with only a watch (unbeknownst to Defoe), paper, pen, and ink. With these tools Marx's Robinson enacts the theory of value in the time of factory labor and the incomplete abolition of slavery. Al-Bustānī—like Faraḥ Anṭūn forty years later—confronts this unevenly syncopated, up-to-the-minute temporality in Arabic, as imperial finance reshapes the resources of the Eastern Mediterranean and migrant laborers depart its shores to work in textile mills in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States.
Journal of Palestine Studies 50, 2020
For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafan... more For the last decade of his life, the Palestinian intellectual, author, and editor Ghassan Kanafani (d. 1972) was deeply immersed in theorizing, lecturing, and publishing on Palestinian resistance literature from Beirut. A refugee of the 1948 war, Kanafani presented his theory of resistance literature and the notion of “cultural siege” at the March 1967 Beirut conference of the Soviet-funded Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA). Articulated in resistance to Zionist propaganda literature and in solidarity with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary struggles in the Third World, Kanafani was inspired by Maxim Gorky, William Faulkner, and Mao Zedong alike. In books, essays, and lectures, Kanafani argued that Zionist propaganda literature served as a “weapon” in the war against Palestine, returning repeatedly to Arthur Koestler’s 1946 Thieves in the Night. Better known for his critique of Stalinism in Darkness at Noon (1940), Koestler was also actively involved in waging cultural Cold War, writing the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Congress for Cultural Freedom 1950 manifesto and helping the organization infiltrate Afro-Asian writing in the wake of Bandung. Kanafani’s 1960s theory of resistance literature thus responded at once to the psychological dislocation of Zionist propaganda fiction and the cultural infiltration of Arabic literature in the Cold War.
Research in African Literatures, 2019
in the fall of 1966, Ḥiwār magazine published al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novel Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-sha... more in the fall of 1966, Ḥiwār magazine published al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novel Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-shamāl [Season of Migration to the North]. Arabic literary critics both hailed the novel in the Arabic press and mourned that it had been pub- lished by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Ḥiwār. The CCF had been revealed just months before to be a global covert cultural front of the Cold War founded and funded by the United States Central intelligence Agency, maintaining an extensive list of high profile literary magazines, including not only the Beirut-based Arabic magazines Ḥiwār and briefly Adab, but also the London-based Encounter, Bombay’s Quest, and the African journals Black Orpheus in ibadan and Transition in Kampala. in response to the 1955 Bandung conference for Afro-Asian solidarity, the CCF established a formidable network of its own, founding and funding African and Asian magazines, putting on conferences, art exhibits, and handsomely paying a significant cadre of intellectuals, writers, and artists worldwide. it would be more than a decade later that the CiA’s domination of Afro-Asian literature would give way to the publication of the Afro-Asian Writers Association’s trilingual (Arabic/English/French) journal Afro-Asian Writings (later to be called Lotus), a broadly imagined legacy of the 1955 Bandung Conference for Afro-Asian Solidarity and its celebration of decolonization, various forms of communism and socialism, and resistance literature in the third world.
drawing from Encounter, Ḥiwār, and other journals of the CCF, the Arabic press, letters exchanged by Ṣāliḥ and Ḥiwār’s editor Tawfīq Ṣāyigh, and the archives of the international Association for Cultural Freedom, this article argues that Season of Migration to the North, oft read as a postcolonial novel, is better understood as a product of American Cold War cultural imperialism. if its protagonist, Mustafa Sa‘eed, might aspire, as though tak- ing a page from Frantz Fanon, to liberate Africa with his penis as he beds a series of British women, seducing them with Orientalist fantasy, and if the novel’s unnamed narrator might see that the newly independent Sudanese government was being corrupted by American cars, air conditioners, and opulent conferences and government ministries, the novel itself is doing something still more. As it reaches back intertextually to pre-islamic poetry, the wine odes of ‘Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās, and the tales of A Thousand and One Nights in British translation, Ṣāliḥ’s novel exposes the long chain of empires subtending the dissemination of Arabic literature that left it vulnerable to becoming a terrain of cultural Cold War after Bandung’s call for Afro-Asian solidarity.
Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018)
Arabic Literature for the Classroom (Routledge 2017)
Campaigning Culture and the Global Cultural Cold War (Palgrave 2017)
Middle Eastern Literatures (2014)
Journal of Arabic Literature (2013)
In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom,... more In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and funded a worldwide network of literary journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits and other cultural events). From 1962 until its scandalous collapse over the course of 1966 and the early months of 1967, Tawfīq Ṣ āyigh edited the CCF's Arabic outpost Ḥ iwār from Beirut, joining a growing web of CCF journals, including London's Encounter, Kampala's Transition, Bombay's Quest, and the Latin American, Paris-based Mundo Nuevo. Ḥ iwār, a journal funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and thus covertly by the CIA, sought to co-opt the Arab avant-garde, offering authors both material compensation for their writing, as well as the much lauded cultural freedom. By 1966, Ḥ iwār's promise to writers of both bread and freedom collapsed in the pages of the Arabic press under the weight of paradox and a worldwide scandal on the eve of the 1967 Arab defeat. Keywords Congress for Cultural Freedom; CIA; Ḥ iwār; Tawfīq Ṣ āyigh; literary journals; 1960s; freedom; the avant-garde; cultural materialism; Cold War * Research for this article in Beirut and Washington, D.C. was generously supported by Bard College. My thanks are due also to my students at Bard in World Literature and the CIA, to Jason Frydman, Cole Heinowitz, and the outside readers of the Journal of Arabic Literature for their helpful comments on previous drafts. A shorter version of this paper was presented at a panel on Arabic Literature and the 1960s at the 2012 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association Conference in Denver, Colorado. I am grateful to the audience for their thoughtful questions. Portions of this article that focus on Ḥ iwār and the work of al-Ṭ ayyib Ṣ āliḥ were presented at the 2012 Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts as part of a panel on Teaching Arabic Literature; I am grateful to Vilashini Cooppan for her insightful comments as panel moderator. [T]he sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. It therefore has to consider as contributing to production not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work-critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of art as such. 2
Journal of Arabic Literature (2009)
Journal of Arabic Literature, 2008
is paper argues that Ah! ! lām Mustaghānamī's novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) ena... more is paper argues that Ah! ! lām Mustaghānamī's novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria's Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair, is problematically obscured. e press reviews of the novel's French translation serve to reveal, furthermore, that a French readership's familiarity with the significant corpus of Francophone Algerian literature mutes the legibility of the Algerian linguistic drama that Mustaghānamī's novel articulates in the Arabic original.
Cartography and Clandestinité in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts
Dialectical Anthropology, 2005
Reviews of *Fictitious Capital* by Elizabeth M Holt
Rebecca C. Johnson's review of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2019
Ziad Dallal's review essay, The Material and Materialist History of the Nahḍa Press
Review of Middle East Studies, 2019
Ghenwa Hayek's Review of Fictitious capital: silk, cotton, and the rise of the Arabic novel
Middle Eastern Literatures , 2018
Dissertation by Elizabeth M Holt
Serialization and silk: The emergence of a narrative reading public of Arabic in Beirut, 1870-1884
Papers by Elizabeth M Holt
Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Cairo and the cultural cold war for Afro-Asia
The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, 2018
Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018)
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Articles and Book Chapters by Elizabeth M Holt
drawing from Encounter, Ḥiwār, and other journals of the CCF, the Arabic press, letters exchanged by Ṣāliḥ and Ḥiwār’s editor Tawfīq Ṣāyigh, and the archives of the international Association for Cultural Freedom, this article argues that Season of Migration to the North, oft read as a postcolonial novel, is better understood as a product of American Cold War cultural imperialism. if its protagonist, Mustafa Sa‘eed, might aspire, as though tak- ing a page from Frantz Fanon, to liberate Africa with his penis as he beds a series of British women, seducing them with Orientalist fantasy, and if the novel’s unnamed narrator might see that the newly independent Sudanese government was being corrupted by American cars, air conditioners, and opulent conferences and government ministries, the novel itself is doing something still more. As it reaches back intertextually to pre-islamic poetry, the wine odes of ‘Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās, and the tales of A Thousand and One Nights in British translation, Ṣāliḥ’s novel exposes the long chain of empires subtending the dissemination of Arabic literature that left it vulnerable to becoming a terrain of cultural Cold War after Bandung’s call for Afro-Asian solidarity.
Reviews of *Fictitious Capital* by Elizabeth M Holt
Dissertation by Elizabeth M Holt
Papers by Elizabeth M Holt