Introduction

A recent wave of research across several fields has emphasized the seriality of print media like journals and periodicals, especially for the late 19th and 20th centuries, when such formats were essentially the New Media of their day. Previous studies, like Benedict Anderson’s now classical thesis on post-colonial nationalism in Imagined Communities (1983) have born out the powers of novel forms and circuits of communication to create and promote association, companionship, and social cohesion, especially for the larger constellation of national boundaries, cultural identities, and confessional divisions that still determine today’s world. This special issue investigates the same formative potential, but concerning the periphery of the Islamicate Middle East, as it were, namely in relation to either diaspora networks and minority communities or to other seemingly marginal cases far away from the symbolic centers of the Muslim World. Viewed before the background of the regional and confessional patterns of book culture, early print history, and mediated community formation prior to the large-scale adoption of printing since the second half of the 19th century, the contexts and dynamics under study here reveal developments with a pronounced translocal and entangled character. Drawing on the methodological approach of Periodical Studies, the role and effect of print periodicals for communities on the Islamicate periphery are conceptualized along the lines of Birgit Meyer’s Aesthetic Formations (2009

Colonialism · Confessional · Diaspora · Ethnic group · Nationalism · Print culture · Relation (database) · Situated · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Islamic Studies and History