Global soft power forces collided in the cold war, curating and disseminating printed materials that confronted poets, authors, artists and editors with competing demands. Alignment in a table of contents and in the face of cold war polarities were not always distinguishable. This panel begins with traces of a catalogue of typographical méconnaissance in cold war publications and archives, interrogating the legibility of influence and location, and the legacy of these uncertainties. We then invite the audience to participate in a collective reading drawn from the pages of Afro-Asian Writings/Lotus and the contemporary art practices of Fehras Publishing Practices.
EUME Berliner Seminar
Wed 14 Jan 2026 | 17:00–18:30
Wed 14 Jan 2026 | 17:00–18:30
Alignment, Justification, Margin, Error: Typography and the Cold War
Elizabeth M. Holt (Bard College / EUME Fellow 2015/16) in conversation with Sina Ahmadi and Sami Rustom (both Fehras Publishing Practices)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
Elizabeth M. Holt is the author of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (Fordham UP 2017) and articles and book chapters on Arabic literature and culture, the cold war, Palestine, and the history of the novel. She is Associate Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College and recently curated and directed the Common Course in Carbon and the Humanities at Bard. She lectures on literary theory, translation, soft power, petroculture, solar power, poetry, and the novel, and regularly screens classic and contemporary Palestinian films. Her new projects include Solar Readings and Syncretic Lexica. In the academic year 2015/16, Elizabeth was a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Fehras Publishing Practices is a cultural workers collective spanning Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, based in Berlin. They explore cultural legacy in southwest Asia and North Africa and their diasporas. The collective works across publishing, scenography, architecture and performance. Fehras focuses on the role of publishing as a tool of creating, transferring, and disseminating knowledge as well as a means to foster horizontal and vertical solidarities. Their research primarily utilises different audio-visual and publishing archives. They collect, organise, and re-curate these materials placing them in diverse spatial and temporal contexts to address liberation struggles, cultures of memory, gender, identity, migration and cultural organisation. Sina Ahmadi and Sami Rustom will be representing the collective. www.fehraspublishingpractices.org
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.