EUME
2015/ 2016

Elizabeth M. Holt

Disseminating the Cultural Cold War in Arabic: The CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Literary Journal “Hiwar” (1962-67)

Elizabeth M. Holt received her PhD in Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture, and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2009. She is Assistant Professor of Arabic in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College, a small liberal arts college in the hamlet of Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where Holt teaches courses in Arabic language, Arabic literature, world literature and translation, literary theory, and Middle Eastern Studies. Holt serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature, a journal she has edited since 2008. Holt's first book Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel is forthcoming in 2017 with Fordham University Press. Fictitious Capital reads an archive of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, letters, first editions and private papers in Arabic and French, revealing how finance and the novel at once tell the other's story, a plotline of serialized hope and fear charted in the journals of Beirut through the silk market, and meted out in Cairo in cotton shares. Research for the book was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship in Cairo in 2012 through the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American Research Center in Egypt. 

Disseminating the Cultural Cold War in Arabic: The CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67)

“Disseminating the Cultural Cold War” argues that our own present sense of the field of Arabic literature was produced through the strictures of American imperial power, and in particular the post-World War II inheritance by the United States of the colonial mantle of the French and British. Taking its center of historical gravity as the 1960s - a decade marked by the ascent and collapse of Arab nationalist politics, and the rise of the Sixties Generation of avant-gardist Arabic literature -, “Disseminating the Cultural Cold War” reconfigures our perspective on this decade by placing it in a continuum of American imperial cultural power extending both well before and well after the 1967 Arab defeat to Israel. With chapters on Palestine; Arabic book prizes and cultural capital; the 1960s Arabic literary scene in London, Beirut and Cairo; and the CIA's fondness for modernist poets, “Disseminating the Cultural Cold War” articulates the pressure that American empire persistently exerted and still exerts on the production, dissemination, and reception of Arabic literature.
At the center of the manuscript project is the Congress for Cultural Freedom's Arabic journal Ḥiwār, which published from 1962 until 1967. In April of 1966, the New York Times revealed that the CIA had covertly founded and funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its worldwide network of conferences, art exhibits, concerts and especially literary journals, inciting a range of reactions across the United States, Europe and the decolonizing world. While the episode was taken in stride by the Paris-based Latin American CCF journal Mundo nuevo, and left the Bombay-based Quest relatively unscathed, for the CCF's Arabic and African journals, the narrative was one of shock, scandal, and reproach, casting a long shadow over the very possibility of cultural freedom, one that persists in Arabic to this day.