Andrew Amstutz is an Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY.) He received his PhD from Cornell University. He has published articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Philological Encounters, and South Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Fulbright-Hays, and AIPS. Prior to joining Queens College, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Authors | Andrew Amstutz
Articles on Amodern by Andrew Amstutz
AMODERN 12: COUNTERTYPE
Typography, Alternative Print Technologies and Everyday Ephemera
This issue of Amodern turns to new scholarship on typography in the expanded field of reproductive print technologies. It has its roots in “Before and Beyond Typography,” a 2020 conference sponsored by Stanford University that explored “the vitality of non-typographic publishing networks” and “the dynamic interplay between technological change and non-typographic printing” around the globe. ((While the originally scheduled in-person conference in April 2020 was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic, it was reworked as a virtual conference series in summer 2020. Organized by Thomas S. Mullaney and Andrew Amstutz, the conference drew together scholars working on print cultures that either preceded the global spread of industrial type printing and the discursive conflation of type with modernity or jostled alongside type in the twentieth century as “alternative trajectories.” ((Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 (UBC Press, 2004), 89.)) The animating question of “Before and Beyond Typography” was this: “What becomes of our understanding of ‘-graphics’ when we dislodge the prefix ‘typo-’ from its long-dominant position and place it alongside those of ‘chiro-’, ‘xylo-’, ‘litho-’, ‘mimeo-’, ‘xero-’, ‘seri-’, and other methods and technologies?”
The five articles in this issue respond to this question, extending it both chronologically and thematically to document what Mullaney has elsewhere described as the “vibrant technolinguistic imagination” before, beyond, and alongside type. Exploring the relationship between revolution, new technologies, and visual cultures, Gallo shows how these “foot soldiers of technology” used “cameras, typewriters, radios, and other mechanical instruments” in their practice and “embraced the new technological media and wrote eloquent accounts of their mechanical encounters.” This issue extends Gallo's analysis to print culture, with each article variously locating – and dislocating – typography via encounters with print-making around the world. Aesthetic interventions made with alternative text technologies comprise a major aspect of our focus; but so, too, does everyday use: as these articles will show, it is often in printed ephemera that one sees so-called “typographic modernity” thoroughly pushed to the periphery.
THE LEAD LETTERS OF NASTA’LīQ
Experiments with Movable Type and Debates over Modernity in Hyderabad
This article follows the discussions over history and comparisons to other languages that were part of experiments with type technology for the Urdu language in late colonial India. Specifically, it examines how some Indian Muslim printers and intellectuals in Hyderabad crafted movable type technology for Urdu that could approximate the handwritten aesthetics and slanting style of the nasta‘līq form of the Perso-Arabic script in the early 1930s. This article explores how Urdu’s script became the site of technological experimentation, debates over transregional Islamic ties, and articulations of local Muslim sovereignty in India. In so doing, it addresses a less studied aspect of Urdu print culture in which lithography predominated, namely how some Urdu printers experimented with movable type for nasta‘līq.