Dr. Raja Adal

Join the Humanities Center at our Thursday colloquia. Raja Adal (Pitt, History) will discuss his written work, prepared responses by several faculty experts on the topic and then an open discussion among the participants and the audience. The respondents will be Annette Vee (Pitt, English) and Chris Warren (CMU, English).

The first section of this paper provides a background for the print sublime by discussing the global script regime, namely the distribution of different scripts across the world, in relation to the increasing use of printed text that came with the commercialization of typewriters for various world scripts. The second and third sections introduce the print sublime in the world of Arabic and of Devanagari characters, respectively. It introduces a number of cases where the typewriter was either considered a savior that helped make scripts viable in the modern world or, alternatively, a danger by bestowing seditious materials that were critical of modern states with the sublime quality of printed texts. The conclusion looks beyond the age of the typewriter to ask about the afterlives of the print sublime.

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