Elizabeth M Holt
* Associate Professor of Arabic, Division of Languages and Literature
* Faculty, Center for Ethics and Writing (Translation, in Theory (fall 2023))
* Director, Common Course in Carbon and the Humanities (spring 2024)
Bard College
PhD in Comparative Literature and Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University (with distinction)
BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Harvard University
- Postdoctoral Fellow of the Europe in the Middle East/the Middle East in Europe program at the Forum Transregional Studien in Berlin
- National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, American Research Center in Egypt, Cairo
- Research Associate, American University of Beirut
- Gerhardt Award of Distinction and Fulbright IIE Fellow, Center for Arabic Studies, American University in Cairo
* Faculty, Center for Ethics and Writing (Translation, in Theory (fall 2023))
* Director, Common Course in Carbon and the Humanities (spring 2024)
Bard College
PhD in Comparative Literature and Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University (with distinction)
BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Harvard University
- Postdoctoral Fellow of the Europe in the Middle East/the Middle East in Europe program at the Forum Transregional Studien in Berlin
- National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, American Research Center in Egypt, Cairo
- Research Associate, American University of Beirut
- Gerhardt Award of Distinction and Fulbright IIE Fellow, Center for Arabic Studies, American University in Cairo
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Book by Elizabeth M Holt
Financial speculation engendered a habit of looking to the future with hope and fear, an anxious disposition formally expressed in the mingling of financial news and serialized novels in such Arabic journals as Al-Jinān, Al-Muqtaṭaf, and Al-Hilāl. Gardens appear and reappear in these novels, citations of a botanical dream of the Arabic press that for a moment tried to manage the endless sense of uncertainty on which capital preys. Attuned to the economic and cultural anxiety animating this archive, Fictitious Capital recasts the historiography of the Nahdah and its oft-celebrated sense of rise and renaissance. Reading Nahḍah as Walter Benjamin might have, as “one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins," Fictitious Capital shows instead how this utopian, imperially mediated narrative of capital encrypted its inevitable counterpart, capital flight.
https://www.scribd.com/book/346659173/Fictitious-Capital-Silk-Cotton-and-the-Rise-of-the-Arabic-Novel
https://books.google.com/books?id=GDsoDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=elizabeth+holt+fictitious+capital&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifnfGiutPYAhVCYt8KHcKwA7MQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=elizabeth%20holt%20fictitious%20capital&f=false
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823276035/fictitious-capital/
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
Financial speculation engendered a habit of looking to the future with hope and fear, an anxious disposition formally expressed in the mingling of financial news and serialized novels in such Arabic journals as Al-Jinān, Al-Muqtaṭaf, and Al-Hilāl. Gardens appear and reappear in these novels, citations of a botanical dream of the Arabic press that for a moment tried to manage the endless sense of uncertainty on which capital preys. Attuned to the economic and cultural anxiety animating this archive, Fictitious Capital recasts the historiography of the Nahdah and its oft-celebrated sense of rise and renaissance. Reading Nahḍah as Walter Benjamin might have, as “one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins," Fictitious Capital shows instead how this utopian, imperially mediated narrative of capital encrypted its inevitable counterpart, capital flight.
https://www.scribd.com/book/346659173/Fictitious-Capital-Silk-Cotton-and-the-Rise-of-the-Arabic-Novel
https://books.google.com/books?id=GDsoDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=elizabeth+holt+fictitious+capital&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifnfGiutPYAhVCYt8KHcKwA7MQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=elizabeth%20holt%20fictitious%20capital&f=false
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823276035/fictitious-capital/
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.