Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut

ABSTRACT This paper reads narrative published in the journals of 1870s Beirut in the context of an emerging bourgeois readership and argues that the significance of this archive to modern Arabic fiction has been neglected by critics. Taking the intensification of the silk trade with France following the civil war of 1860 as a point of historical departure, this paper traces the nexus of multiple influences upon narrative forms published in the burgeoning press of this period. Reading two serialized novels of 1870 alongside one another, this paper reveals the centrality of suspense to the proliferation of the press and the novel form. Anticipation, anxiety and hope pervade the pages of these periodicals as readers and writers negotiate changing notions of class and gender. The final portion of the paper returns to the question of influence, exposing the overdetermined narrative weave that connects these early serialized Arabic novels to not only the European novel, but also the heritage of popular Arabic storytelling epitomized by A Thousand and One Nights

Cold War in the Arabic Press: Ḥiwār (Beirut, 1962–67) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom

ABSTRACT Extensively quoting from the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a Cold War organization founded as a CIA front in 1950, this chapter provides a history for their Arabic literary activities, including the journals Aṣwāt, Adab, and their best known work in the region: Ḥiwār (1962–67), edited by Palestinian poet Tawfīq Ṣāyigh from Beirut with broad dissemination in the Arab world. The chapter also outlines the CCF’s other interventions in the Arab cultural sphere from 1955 in the wake of Bandung. Over the course of its nearly five-year run, Ḥiwār and other CCF journals published both emerging and established authors, serving as a register of some of the most important Arab historians, critics, essayists, short-story writers, novelists and poets of the 1960s, including Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Ghādah al-Sammān, Albert Hourani, Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, Walīd al-Khālidī, Zakariyyā Tāmir, Laylā Baʿalbakī, Ṣalāḥ ʿAbd al-Ṣubūr, Salmā al-Khaḍrāʾ al-Jayyūsī, Ṣabrī Ḥāfiẓ, Luwịs ʿAwaḍ, Fuʾād al-Takarlī, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ and Yūsuf Idrīs. Ḥiwār also published CCF-supplied interviews with major international cultural figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, György Lukács, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Picasso, and letters from CCF representatives and authors across the world

Cartography and Clandestinité in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts

Abstract. In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFrench state in its colonization of North Africa and particularly Algeria, and later in itsattempts to control the banlieues its policies of citizenship and cartographic controlyielded on the margins of Paris. In this context, I will explore the ways in which thenovel’s characters, living clandestinely in asquatt, simultaneously resist, put to use, andeven supercede state documents of control as they disrupt everyday life and conductheists across the city of Paris. The paper will explore unofficial cartographies of Paris,from those afforded by the radios libres and alternative publications such as Libe´ ration and Sans Frontierez, to oral and almost proverbial networks of knowledge criss-crossingthe city of Paris, while also tracing the uses to which supplemental cartographic sketchesand counterfeit identity cards are put in the pages of the novel. The paper will be indialogue with theoretical and critical formulations of space, cartography, and statecontrol put forward by Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and TomConley. The paper will conclude with a consideration of the means and limits of resistance by the novel’s characters in the context of this body of theory and criticis

“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67) (complete)

In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Free- dom, with its main offices in Paris, lhe 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 1 962 until its scandalous collapse over the course of 1966 and the early months of 1967, Tawfîq Sãyigh edited the CCF s Arabic outpost Hiwãr 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. Hiwãr , 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, Hiwãr 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

“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67)

Abstract 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 fiinded 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, Tawfiq Säyigh edited the CCF's Arabic outpost Hiwdr from Beirut, joining a growing web of CCP journals, including London's Eneounter, Kampala's Transition, Bombay's Quest, and the Latin American, Paris-based Mundo Nuevo. Hiwdr, a journal fiinded 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, Hiwdr'% 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

Comparison of the Molecular Structures of Monovalent Cation Salets of N,N-Dimethyldithiocarbamate. Novel Synthesis and Crystal Structure of (Phi4)(S2CN(CH3)2)2H2O

Crystals of the tetraphenylphosphonium N,N-dimethyldithiocarbamate dihydrate (C₂₇H₃₀NO₂PS₂; F.W. = 495.6) are monoclinic; P2₁/n; a = 13.349(6), b = 20,968(6), c = 9.800(4) Å, β = 109.01(3)°; Z = 4; V = 2593.4(16) Å^3; Dₓ = 1.269 gcm- 3 . Data were collected at ambient temperature using MoKα radiation (λ = 0.71069 Å).F(000) = 1048, linear absorption coefficient, n = 2.80 cm- 1. The structure was solved by direct methods and subsequently refined by full matrix least squares techniques. Final R value = 0.064 for 1 61 0 reflections and 298 varied parameters. Due to the nature of the cation, interactions between the tetraphenylphosphonium group and the sulfur atoms of the anion are absent, unlike previous dimethyldithiocarbamate structures (Na+, Cs+, TI+). Intermolecular interactions between the waters of hydration and the anion are present

Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ's Season of Migration to the North, the CIA, and the Cultural Cold War after Bandung

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 published by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom's Ḥiwār, part of a global covert cultural front of the Cold War founded and funded by the CIA, 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. A calculated response to the 1955 Bandung conference for Afro-Asian solidarity, 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 Bandung's celebration of decolonization, various forms of communism and socialism, and resistance literature in the third world. Season of Migration to the North , oft read as a postcolonial novel, is better understood as a product of American Cold War cultural imperialism. 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

From Gardens of Knowledge to Ezbekiyya after Midnight: The Novel and the Arabic Press from Beirut to Cairo, 1870-1892

Late 19th-century Beirut and Cairo were capitals of Arabic literary production and press activity. A period, oft deemed a nahḍah, that witnessed the advent of the novel form or riwāyah in Arabic, this was also the moment of intensified French and British imperial involvement in the region, and the concomitant industrialization of Beirut’s silk and Egypt’s cotton markets. This article argues that, through the novels published in and promoted through the region’s burgeoning private journals and newspapers, editors and novelists revived the literary trope of the garden of knowledge as a spatial metaphor for the Arabic reading public. While the 1870s in Beirut began as a hopeful decade—the civil war of 1860 buried in the fortunes being made off Mt Lebanon’s mulberry orchards—by 1890s Cairo these Edenic hopes were replaced by a sense of melancholy in the face of rampant speculation, accumulating in the gardens of Ezbekiyya. Reading two novels, Salım̄ al-Bustānı’̄ s 1870 Al-Huyām fı-̄ jinān al-Shām and Jurjı̄ Zaydān’s 1892 Asır̄ al-mutamahdı,̄ against the literary and press activities of the Bustānı̄ family’s Al-Jinān, Zaydān’s Al-Hilāl, Khalıl̄ al-Khūrı’̄ s Hadıq̄ at al-Akhbār, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn’s Al-Zahrah, Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥı’̄ s Misḅ āḥ al-Sharq, and Fāris Nimr and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf’s Al-Muqtaṭaf, this article offers a literary history of speculation and capital for late 19th-century Arabic

3-ethoxycarbonyl-5-methoxycarbonyl-2,6-dimethyl-4-(3-nitrophenyl)pyridinium nitrate, dineopentyl 2,6-dimethyl-4-(3-nitrophenyl)pyridine-3,5-dicarboxylate and dihexyl 2,6-dimethyl-4-(3-nitrophenyl)pyridine-3,5-dicarboxylate

The single-crystal X-ray structures of three oxidation products of 4-(3-nitrophenyl)-1,4-dihydropyridine, namely, 3-ethoxycarbonyl-5-methoxycarbonyl-2,6-dimethyl-4-(3-nitrophenyl)pyridinium nitrate, C18H19N2O6+.NO3-, dineopentyl 2,6-dimethyl-4-(3-nitrophenyl)pyridine-3,5-dicarboxylate, C25H32N2O6, and dihexyl 2,6-dimethyl-4-(3-nitrophenyl)pyridine-3,5-dicarboxylate, C27H36N2O6, suggest that their decreased calcium-blocking activity arises from incompatibility of the phenyl ring and ester conformation with the receptor site.Peer reviewedChemistr

Sodium silver tricobalt bis(diphosphate) and sodium silver copper(II) diphosphate

The crystal structures of two new diphosphates, sodium silver tricobalt bis(diphosphate), (Na1.42Ag0.58)Co3(P2O7)2, and sodium silver copper(II) diphosphate, (Na1.12Ag0.88)CuP2O7, provide examples of the effect of mixing Na and Ag in the same site of known host phosphate compounds. The small differences in ionic radii of the two monocations do not lead to significant differences in the structural details. In the latter compound, the Cu atom lies on an inversion center.Peer reviewedChemistr