Abstract
This introductory chapter draws on several fields including comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and literary, multiple, and alternative modernities in order to conceptualize comparative print culture for the study of alternative literary modernities. The former term, as this chapter designates it, concerns a range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, contextualize, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. Additionally, the present essay demonstrates the latter, alternative literary modernities, mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print, further deconstructing their perceived universality. This chapter accomplishes the above-said goals by describing, contesting, and/or contextualizing previous exemplary as well as forthcoming scholarly works.
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Notes
- 1.
Also, see her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for a critique of postcolonialism as a regulation of the nuances and complexities of cultural practices in the South in conformity with fixed, reductive North American academic models of postcolonial study. Moreover, by sketching alternative sites of literary modernity and print culture, this anthology attempts to provide responses, albeit partial ones, to the demonstration in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” of the inaudibility of voices on the periphery.
- 2.
Even though his work does not concern China or print culture, Hamid Dabashi does outline an account of an endogenous modernity; see his The World of Persian Literary Humanism.
- 3.
For another study of multiple modernities, see Jenny Kwok Wah Lau’s Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia (2002). This anthology explores East Asia’s multiple modernities as locale-based reactions in which “each society mobilizes its own cultural resources, less for ‘coping’ with Westernization, as the West may view it, than for a double negotiation between social and cultural modernity” (9). Lau’s work also highlights the transregional dialectics underlying the formation of cultures of modernity in the area, amongst other things (2002, 3), debunks the view of the formation of East Asian culture as a one-way response to the “West” (2002, 7), and demonstrates that the cinematic portrayals of women in traditional and popular cinema of Hong Kong are more progressive than their counterparts in artistic films (2002, 8–9).
- 4.
For an account of the origins of the term alternative modernity in anthropology, see Kelly, “Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to ‘Modernity’” (2002).
- 5.
While this volume features contributions on China and Japan, it is worth highlighting the continuing paucity of scholarly material on the early print culture of East Asia. For instance, Japan enjoyed a vibrant woodblock printing culture in the Edo period, while, as another example, metal movable typography was employed in Korea during the fourteenth century. For more on these early print cultures, see Kornicki, The Book in Japan (2001); Berry, Japan in Print (2006); and Kamei-Dyche, “The History of Books and Print Culture in Japan” (2011); as well as Kim, “Literary Production, Circulating Libraries, and Private Publishing” (2004); and McKillop, “The History of the Book in Korea” (2013).
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Aliakbari, R. (2020). Comparative Print Culture and Alternative Literary Modernities: A Critical Introduction to Frameworks and Case Studies. In: Aliakbari, R. (eds) Comparative Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3_1
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