The Arabic Typewriter: Towards a Global History
This project pursues for the first time the global cultural history of the Arabic alphabet typewriter. At present, almost nothing is known about this machine. Although Latin-alphabet typewriters transformed clerical labour across Europe and America, the Arabic typewriter never made the mainstream. And yet as our present moment surely reminds us, the significance of a technology may have little to do with its intended uses. Upon its invention the Arabic typewriter was met with suspicion; it was banned across the Ottoman Empire from the early twentieth century. But it later became associated with clandestine intellectual and political activity across the Arabic and Ottoman Turkish-speaking world. Over the course of the twentieth century it travelled further, generating user communities from Berlin to New York, and finding strange new affordances. My project traces the Arabic typewriter’s international movements and cross-cultural iterations from 1890 to the present day, combining archival research with oral history and literary and cultural analysis toward an experimental cultural history. The project will I hope offer crucial new insight into twentieth-century Arabic cultural, aesthetic, and political movements and the role of technologies within them. But it will also ask wider questions: How do media travel and transform across borders? What can we learn from the barriers, glitches, and failures they also encounter? And how do human communities both shape, and become shaped by, the writing technologies they use?
