Arwa Salih’s al-Mubtasarun (Stillborns, 1996) is an insightful reflection upon her Seventies Generation, the 1971-72 Student Movement that she led, and the fate of the Left in post-infitah neoliberal Egypt. Her book, published several years after most of it was written, is difficult to categorize. It is theoretical, analytical, deeply personal, and political. Salih introduces al-Mubtasarun with a preface written just before its publication, i.e., several years after she wrote the heart of the book. In her preface, she notes that her language and historical worldview were nationalist, despite her communism. Nationalism was forefront in the Student Movement’s calls for war with Israel and survived – even fueled – Egypt’s 1973 infitah and decades of neoliberal consolidation. In recounting this political and intellectual history, Salih points to the split in her “contradictory consciousness” – simultaneously nationalist and Marxist – that was once a coherent anti-colonial political project of socialist national liberation. I turn to al-Mubtasarun and Salih’s posthumously published collection of poetry and literary criticism Saratan al-Ruh (Cancer of the Soul, 1997) to situate the post-infitah unravelling the Marxist and nationalist strands of Arab Nationalism. In particular, I am interested in the way Salih’s Marxism sustains her analysis of literature, culture, and politics whereas nationalism for her is increasingly a violent right-wing political force. By grounding my paper in Salih’s critical vocabulary of “stillborns,” “militant kitsch,” “contradictory consciousness,” and “post-nationalist nihilism,” I argue that her writing acts as a necessary bridge for theorizing Egyptian politics, culture, and literature in the neoliberal era. The theoretical bridge she offers is especially important in linking the collapse of Nasser’s socialism and Sadat’s infitah to the post-2011 consolidation of military rule and right-wing neoliberal economic policy. Salih’s critical engagement with nationalism and Marxism in this historicized manner speaks to politics and literature beyond Egypt. Given the near ubiquity of the neoliberal order, she is an important voice grappling with the global state of anti-colonial and Marxist politics and culture in an era dominated by capitalism and right-wing nationalisms.