Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and The American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut

摘要

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.