Printing Arab Modernity
Book Culture and The American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9363567 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zeina Maasri (0000-0002-4395-7406, Lecturer in Critical History and Politics School of Humanities University of Brighton, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 112-113 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-06 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Design History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0952-4649 • E-ISSN: 1741-7279 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jdh/epx041 |
| OpenAlex | W2803755143 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Critical histories of the nineteenth-century Middle Eastern visual and material culture are in full bloom at present, putting in question Eurocentric framings of modernity to closely examine the experiences and productions of local actors in this fraught historical conjuncture. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity is a key contribution to this emerging body of literature. For this reason alone, the book demands to be read by anyone concerned with a global history of design. It is focussed on the nascent Arab press and the American missionary press, in particular, in mid-nineteenth-century Beirut during a critical period of changing political, intellectual and aesthetic realms in the Ottoman provinces of the Eastern Mediterranean. Benefitting from foreign missionaries as well as from independent financing of a growing Christian, Muslim, and Jewish urban intellectual elite, the cosmopolitan Levantine port city—Beirut—developed as a key geographic pole of Arabic printing and publishing in the region. Auji centres her argument on how visuality, often disregarded, is crucial to the social history of the Arabic press. She rightly notes that the much-privileged textuality of books, and print culture more broadly, has to a great extent overshadowed questions of ‘visual literacy’— relying here on Johanna Drucker’s recent argument concerning the visual as a form of knowledge production.1 Through this framework, the book’s typography, layout design, binding and dimensions are examined as crucial markers of ‘visual literacy’ in a moment of transition from scribal to print culture. Based on hitherto overlooked primary sources, the analysis combines design and Islamic art historical methods, including codicology, while also diligently deploying new interdisciplinary bibliographic approaches. Auji’s central contention is that this transitional phase in the history of Arabic printing, from roughly the 1820s to the 1860s, yielded ‘dynamic approaches to the content, layout, organization, and visual conventions of Arabic print culture that varied in their responses to scribal customs and methods, and shifting notions of what books and texts should look like’ (p. 2). Printing Arab Modernity thus intervenes directly in the scholarship of both Islamic art history and Middle Eastern studies
Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Elite · Literacy · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Print culture · Printing press · Publishing · Sociology · Textuality · Visual arts · Visual culture · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.11 |
| Citation span | 1970 - 2025 (56) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |