22. Medienworkshop: Community Building across New Boundaries
Minorities and Diasporic Networks in Islamicate Print Culture
19.01.2024
The research group „Arabic Mass Media and (trans)regional digital cultures” at Munich University convenes a workshop on “Community Building across New Boundaries: Minorities and Diasporic Networks in Islamicate Print Culture,” the public part of which will take place on Friday 19th of January 2024. The workshop extends the research group’s usual purview by drawing inspiration from recent studies that emphasize the seriality of print media like journals and periodicals, especially during the late 19th and 20th centuries, when such formats were essentially the New Media of their day. Many previous studies, like Benedict Anderson’s now classical thesis on post-colonial nationalism in Imagined Communities (1983) or Birgit Meyer's Aesthetic Formations (2009) have born out the powers of especially novel forms and circuits of communication to create and promote association, companionship, and social cohesion. The workshop will investigate the same formative potential, but on a much different level and concerning hitherto neglected phenomena. Looking at the “Age of Steam and Print” as an era of momentous change and upheaval, we want to ask about cases of mediated community building along the margins of the Islamic Middle East, as it were, namely in relation to either diaspora networks and minority communities or to seemingly peripheral regions far away from the symbolic center of the Muslim World. While printed novels, newspapers, and other vernacular media were certainly instrumental in bringing about the larger constellation of national boundaries, cultural identities, and confessional divisions that still determine today’s world, much less is known about how these at some point new media were taken up and employed at the margins, which is to say, by whoever and for whatever did not fall easily into the dominant patterns of the emerging order – with current notions of the Islamic World and Middle East chief among them. In particular, the workshop will expand on the peculiar rhythms of print production and consider the role that serialized publication played in attempts to cultivate communal bonds across regions and oftentimes new borders, be they political or symbolic.
To register, please send an email until January 7, 2024, to: bjoern.bentlage@lmu.de
Workshop Programme January 19, 2024
2.00 p.m. Welcome at the venue: LMU Munich, Leopoldstr. 13, H1 / 1201
2.15 p.m. Introduction, by Björn Bentlage: Of Nations, Bubbles, and Communities: the Imaginative Powers of (trans)Regional Mass Media
3.00 p.m. Break
3.30 p.m. Keynote, by Yvonne Albers: United in Print? Reconsidering 'Community' through Arab Periodical Studies
5.00 p.m. Break
5.30 - 6.30 p.m. Two case studies
- Yezidi Periodicals (since the 1990s), by Qader Shammo
- The Commendatory Republic: Multi-Modal Taqrīẓ in the Periodical al-Maʿrifa (1931-34), by Mariam Elashmawy