Print and Its Discontents

Abstract

This essay proposes to explore the historical movement of text from scribal media to print publication as a translation process in which the printed text is viewed, not as an entirely new cultural product but one that has enjoyed previous lives. The essay first undertakes a revision of the dominant discourses on print in the Middle East, which have generally offered a salvation narrative fraught with Orientalist assumptions connected to the ‘sacredness’ of Arabic and the status of the Qur’an in Islamicate cultures. Likewise, the essay interrogates the historiography of print culture in Europe, which has exaggerated the impact of print and utilized it to create a divided and unequal temporality and geography between Europe and its others. The essay then offers a tentative attempt at a new cultural history which looks at continuities rather than ruptures in genres and practices before and after print, and in which the printing press plays the role of the habilitated and domesticated mediator/translator. To illustrate this, the essay takes the case of the modern Arabic newspaper and resituates it as a direct descendent of the early-modern scribal chronicle rather than as an entirely new innovation of the print age.