Fictitious capital : silk, cotton, and the rise of the Arabic novel

Description

The ups & downs of silk, cotton & stocks synchopated with serialized novels in the late 19th-century Arabic press; time itself was changing. Khalil al-Khuri, Salim al-Bustani, Yusuf al-Shalfun, Jurji Zaydan & Ya'qub Sarruf wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, & risk, increasingly legible as tools of French & British empire unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo & beyond. As silk dominated Beirut's markets & the hopes of its reading public, Cairo speculated in cotton shares, real estate & the stock market, which crashed in 1907. Hoping against fear, at the turn of the century, serialized Arabic fiction negotiated a struggle with its historical moment of finance. While scholars of Arabic prose in this period often write of a Nahdah, a sense of Renaissance, 'Fictitious Capital' argues instead that we read the trope of Nahdah as Walter Benjamin might have, as 'one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins'.  Read more...