Fraser 2008

Robert Fraser, Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script (New York: Routledge, 2008)

“Thought the subject of book history enjoys diverse roots — several French, some British and American — its main guiding lights have to date been drawn from half a millennium’s experience of print culture in the West. Admittedly, over the last few years, the discipline has demonstrated a cautious willingness to peer beyond this spacious lair. Hitherto, however, it has principally conducted this inquiry with outdated — and fairly parochial — equipment. Properly to account for the origins, developments nd proliferation of verbal diffusion in a global environment we require a number of drastic readjustments of vision, entailing for example a radical questioning of what we mean by a book, or indeed by a text. We will also need a broader approach to issues such as production, distribution, exchange, readership, audience and verbal authority than any so far espoused.” (Ix-x)

The problematics of print

1778 quarto, first book set in Bangla (Bengali) type — Halhed’s primer (3); printed in Calcutta; “occupies an iconic place in the print culture of Eastern India, and in 1978 the bicentenary of its publication was celebrated publicly in Calcutta” (5); preface describes English/white supremacy but also claims learning native language may “civilize” the colonizers

“did their book, and the many others printed in Indian typefaces in the decades that followed, represent a mere technical advance, or did they also, as some have insisted, involve a fundamental shift, even a revolution, in South Asian culture?” (6) — could se this as “the exporting of the European Enlightenment, the commodification of a language, the introduction to the east coast of India of a transforming technology of textual reproduction, even arguably the onset of ‘Modernity’ itself” (6)

1831, Robert Moffat using a wooden press in Kuruman, South Africa; dubbed “Segatisho” (literally, a sharp impression) (7) — print missionary tracts/literature in Steswana

Problems of “adapting and extending existing vocabulary in a language that possessed no traditional orthography” (9)

“At Kuruman we are therefore faced, not simply with the introduction of one technology into this part of Africa — that is the press — but with the simultaneous inception of two revolutionary undertakings: script and print together.” (9) — “In effect, they were not printing a written language, but reproducing a language that they had written down experimentally, specifically sot hat they might print it.” (10)

Halhed, Moffat, moments that represent beginnings of African / South Asian publishing — but were they “authentic revolutions, or were they accidental mutations?” (10)

“How much did such initiatives owe, not so much to the intervention of certain resourceful individuals, as to the pre-existent seedbed of local cultures? … Was print annexing Bengali and Setswana, or were Bengali and Setswana annexing print?” (10)

For book historians etc, “The Agest of Speech and Script were then superseded by the Age of Print, the consequences of which were apparently even more extreme” (10)

McLuhan, influence of early books that emphasized these shifts in colonial/imperial ways

McLuhan, Jack Goody, Eisenstein, Ong — paradigm — but “few of those involved in this debate possessed any firsthand knowledge of cultures beyond the West” (14)

Need a postcolonial perspective to see how limited this paradigm is

Difficulty of adapting scripts to movable type; intricate process requiring (local) skilled labor; diacritics etc.

“this was the scale of the challenge that was to face indigenous type founders the length and breadth of India as they reproduced acceptable fonts for langauge after language during the period up the the late 19c (and in some [laces beyond that) when the hand press would remain the dominant technology for printing” (17)

Reliance on local expertise for translation

“iif inn South Asia the challenges facing print culture were the result of script complexity and diversification, in sub-Saharan Africa they were, to some extent at least, products of an orthography gap” (20)

Arabic script regularly used along eastern coast of Africa and Saharan Africa to reproduce local languages; “Beyond Muslim-influenced Africa, however, writing systems had been relatively scarce” (20)

1820s to mid-20c, attempts at writing systems by Africans themselves and “interested outsiders;” Vai syllabary of Liberia (1820s), the Bassa Vah system in Liberai, the 37-letter Bete alphabet in Nigeria, the Bamum system masterminded in Cameroon by Sultan Ibrahim Njoya in late 19c, the Mende syllabary of Sierra Leone (1920)s, the Kpelle syllabary of 88 graphemes invented by Chief Gbili of Anoyea in 1934, N’Ko alphabet invented by Soulemanya Kante of Guinea in 1946

“Attempts by outsiders to inscribe the spoken languages of Africa by contrast were primarily driven by a desire to produce printed books. Wary of the sort of balkanization of writing systems to be found in South Asia, moreover, such interlopers preferred to concentrate their efforts on producing standardized alphabets with modifications on the basic Roman pattern that could be applied across the board for all African languages.” (20)

Karl Richard Lepsius, 1855 system with diacritical marks

Dietrich Hermann Westermann, 1927, Practical Orthography for African Language — “New Script” revising Lepsius

“Print did not therefore emerge against a background of technological nullity but drew on an existing base of skills and mechanical arts that fed and sustained it.” — like metalwork for making type (22)

e.g. lithography was taken up in South Asia because of centuries-old traditions of calligraphy and manuscript production (23)

Pg 24, useful chart