Speaker Details
Dr
Fred H. Lawson
United States of America
Presentation Abstract:
"Printing and Resistance to Imperial Governance in the Arab World": Historians of printing in the Arab world have moved beyond a first generation of studies that linked the comparatively late adoption of mechanical printing techniques to religious inhibitions or efforts by scribes and calligraphers to preserve their respective careers. There is now a general consensus that printed books, pamphlets and newspapers blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the stirrings of an Arab national consciousness. Reinhard Schulze adds that the appearance of printed material led to the simultaneous adoption of new concepts of modernity and tradition, which enabled cultural elites to cultivate broad constituencies for particular modes of thought and argumentation. More important, Francis Robinson points out that the coming of print was facilitated by overt threats to the community, particularly challenges emanating from Europe. Building on these insights, one can conclude that the adoption of printing in the Arab world at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries accompanied burgeoning popular resistance to European intervention in late Ottoman society and politics. Printing offered an inexpensive and effective way to cultivate cultural unity among diverse populations, thereby contributing to the mobilization of an Arab public. At the same time, replacing hand-written documents with printed versions conferred a degree of authority that enabled local forces to meet European antagonists on a more equal basis. This aspect of printed materials is evident in two developments that occurred in the aftermath of the First World War: the substitution of printed manifestos for hand-written petitions and the rise of Engliah-language newspapers in Egypt and Palestine. Both innovations took a form of communication that was prevalent in Europe and transformed it into an instrument with which to resist European rule. Exploring the dynamics of this struggle will shed new light on other episodes in the history of Arab printing, such as the confrontation between the earliest Arab broadsheets and the Ottoman authorities in late nineteenth-century Aleppo.
Status: Confirmed