This essay collection is simultaneously diverse and focused, covering many subject areas that are interrelated in significant ways. The volume features examinations of various contexts of print modernity: African-American intervention via print into the bourgeois class, popular journalism and avant-garde poetry in Argentina, women-oriented commercial periodicals in Australia and Canada, nation formation through literary print in Azerbaijan and Turkey, erotica as popular literary print in Brazil, Indigenous nationhood and print and reading cultures in Canada, revolutionary utopian literary periodicalism in China, womenâs assertion in print and subjectivity formation in India and South Africa, canonization and classicizing through print and designating a native Chinese modernity, and the contest through publishing over outlining modern subjecthood in Japan. Nonetheless, and despite its diversity, the project is grounded in a central framework: the study of alternative literary modernities through the lens of comparative print culture.
Although they may not be explicitly named in every chapter of this collection, a few scholarly strands inform this project. Comparative print culture, the scholarly framework of this project, derives from two major areas: comparative literature on the one hand, and print culture and book history studies, with gestures in the direction of comparison, on the other. Comparative print culture primarily derives from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakâs recommendation in Death of a Discipline of an inclusive comparative literature in conjunction with area studies. In her words, âthe politics of production of knowledge in area studies (and also in anthropology and the other âhuman sciencesâ) can be touched by a new Comparative Literature, whose hallmark remains a care for language and idiomâ (2003, 4â5). Enabled by a transformed area studies, comparative literature becomes further capable of crossing borders of various sorts, including media. Building on this transdisciplinary coordination, Spivak contends that Southern Hemisphere languages must be regarded as dynamic cultural media rather than cultural objects of study based on preconceived Anglo-American academic models.1 According to her, comparative literature and area studies âcan work together in the fostering not only of national literatures of the global South but also of the writing of countless indigenous languages in the world that were programmed to vanish when the maps were madeâ (2003, 15; emphasis in original). Informed by Spivak, rather than presenting a monolithic model for the study of non-European print cultures, this collection recognizes, documents, and examines diversities of various sorts from production to circulation to consumption in printed materials that lead to the shaping of distinct cultures and literatures of modernity. For example, in Chap. 2 of this volume, Daniel Fried seeks to offer an understanding of modernity not necessarily tethered to the Western European experience, but as the simultaneously local and universal consciousness of an irreversible rupture between past and present as delivered in print. Grounded in this conceptualization, he argues that, despite being nascent and partial, the first print-cultural modernity occurred in eleventh-century China, where print was associated with canonicity and classicism in order to drive a high level of consciousness of temporal break and periodization. For this, Fried examines the collection, standardization, and canonization, during the eleventh century, of the works of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, two literati from the late eighth and early ninth centuries. This chapter scrutinizes the classicizing, canonizing, and printing of Han Yuâs and Liu Zongyuanâs against the backdrop of the eleventh-century vibrant publishing industry and thus demonstrates the reinforced perception, during the latter era, of stylistic and technological rupture with the antiquarian past, hence the Song dynasty modernity as opposed to a Tang dynasty archaism . In other words, Friedâs essay outlines an endogenous , rather than a colonial or postcolonial Europe-prompted and thus indigenized , literary print modernity, shedding light on the complexities of the cultural practices embedded in Chinese literary print culture as a distinct conception and materialization of literary print modernity.2
The framework of this anthology also builds upon scholarly conversations on diversifying and multiplying book history studies in under-studied areas, thus the use of the term alternative in reference to sites of examination outside of Europe. A critical understanding of the divergences and convergences in the technology, materials, and cultures of print from inside and outside of the European context is an essential component of this collection. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her now-classic The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), stresses a formerly down-played dimension of European modernization mainly between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. She foregrounds the centrality of the print for the diffusion of classical cultural goods and the resultant nascence, and proliferation, of modern Western cultural, religious, and scientific schemata. However, her argument revolves around the print as an instrument of constancy, fixity, uniformity, and permanence, hence the standardization, amplification, security, and universality flowing therefrom. The current essay collection joins more recent scholarly conversations in comprehending the print, unlike Eisensteinâs, with such attributions as dynamicity, mobility, evolution, and repurposing, thus further challenging Eisensteinâs conceptions of, and further diversifying, the print, not only as an apparatus, but also as a culture and discourse. As an example, in Agent of Change (2007), Sabrina Alcon Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin have partly sought to accomplish the diversification goal, among other objectives. For example, as Kai-wing Chow points out, woodblock printing, a highly developed, economical, and efficient print tradition, was extensively practiced in China, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia, and in Europe, before and after moveable-type printing was introduced in Europe. Having demonstrated this, Chow further suggests that âthe various âculturalâ explanations for the differential impact of printing in Europe and China need to be reconsidered and the history of printing rewritten from a truly comparative perspectiveâ (2007, 192). As another instance, Geoffrey Roper contends that Eisensteinâs theory of print-induced modernity is not thoroughly applicable to the Arab and Muslim contexts due to the specific historical circumstances of Arabic textual transmission and book culture: the relatively late (i.e. in the second half of the nineteenth century) normalization of print as a method of textual transmission, and the prevalence during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of lithography rather than typography to reproduce the calligraphic features of manuscripts (2007, 265â66). In addition, Vivek Bhandari contends in âPrint and the Emergence of Multiple Publics in Nineteenth-Century Punjabâ (2007) that periodicalists and other agents of print used this medium, often outside the purview of the colonial state and European sponsors, alongside oral and performative cultures such as festivals and literary gatherings, to shape multiple public spheres and diverse vernacular literary cultures in India.
Nonetheless, the editors of the afore-cited Agent of Change mostly tend to find cultural evidence for Eisensteinâs theory, rather than contest it, in zones outside of Europe. As such, my proposition for diversification and counterspace with a view of non-European modernities is informed by Robert Fraserâs rich and dense analytical postcolonial book histories more than it is by Agent of Change. In Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes (2008), Fraser attempts to provide âa comparative study with a fairly broad sweepâ focused on Africa and South Asia (ix). Fraser delineates the onset of Indian and African print modernities as reliant, not only on European pioneers in India and in South Africa, but also on local masters in possession of various forms of linguistic and mechanical expertise. Beyond that, Fraserâs work is invested in the examination of the production of multifarious, and at times simultaneous, materializations of the text in orality, script, and print, and brings to light alternative sites such as South Asia and Africa, and alterative expressive media such as Namboothiri Brahminsâ chorus of the Rig Veda in Indiaâs state of Kerala and Egyptian papyri spells. Through these examinations, Fraser challenges homogeneous and Eurocentric notions of the operations of the cultures of print and other media, as conceptualized, for instance, by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Benedict Anderson, and Mar...