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CONTENTS
Contextual Alternate
Journal of Communication, Technology, Design, and History
1.00
Titles and abstracts of all the essays in Contextual Alternate (volume 1) are listed below. The complete illustrated essays appear only in print. Please purchase your copy of the journal here, or write to us if you prefer to set up a subscription.
Volume number: 1 (2021)
ISSN 2755-2764
Volume number: 1 (2021)
ISSN 2755-2764
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Paperback with flaps
208 pages · 170×240 mm
J2021-A
J2021-A
Making tracts attractive: missionary print and the small book in nineteenth-century rural India
1.01
The role of Christian missionaries in socializing the printed book among India’s non-urban population has remained largely unexplored. This essay focuses on the materiality and function of missionary tracts in rural environments during the heyday of Protestant evangelical activity in nineteenth-century British India. Engaging with an understudied print genre and a neglected site in the geography of the book in South Asia, it seeks to understand the role of printed texts in a low-literacy environment. To what degree did vernacular tracts, the most widely circulated genre of missionary print, exemplify concepts of visual piety? What does the study of material and visual dimensions tell us about their use and efficacy? What are the virtues ascribed to small books in a context of intersecting written, oral/aural, and visual cultural practices? This essay argues that tracing the shifting physical appearance of Christian tracts, and missionaries’ evolving attitudes toward them, helps elucidate their varied nature as textual, transactional, metaphorical, and iconic objects.
J2021-B
J2021-B
Popular woodblock print and lithography in the making of China’s global imaginary
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the Chinese pictorial print industry began to supplement its traditional woodblock techniques with copperplate, lithography, as well as chromolithography. While the new technologies presented a challenge to the handicraft industry, the development of print capitalism was slow and regionally disparate. Under these conditions, woodblock printers remained commercially viable for decades after industrial printing was first introduced to China’s coastal cities. Using the example of battle illustrations, this study demonstrates that woodblock print was not abruptly extinguished by industrial print, nor was it subsumed by global modernity. Handicraft printers drew on their own experience as well as on introduced technologies and perspectives to manage change on their own terms.
J2021-C
J2021-C
In-between technologies: the beginnings of Devanagari filmsetting and photocomposition in India
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The mid-twentieth century represents a critical moment of transition and transformation in India, which also extended to typographic technologies in the region. While mechanization had only been introduced in the 1930s/40s for Indian scripts, by the 1950s photocomposition promised an alternative that could overcome the limitations of hot-metal. This essay locates information that has been largely missing from the historical record, it brings to light the earliest photocomposition project and the first commercially realised filmsetting development for Indian scripts. In most historical accounts of Indian typography, photocomposition has been accounted for as a phase of little or no importance, and even as something altogether eschewed for Indian scripts by type manufacturers in anticipation of later digital developments. The essay situates the beginnings of Devanagari filmsetting in the thick of contemporary typographic developments and outlines the various international networks exploring the possibilities of photocomposition for Indian scripts.
J2021-D
J2021-D
Nihon do-banga: an introduction to the Japanese school of etchers, 1783–1900
1.04
Ukiyo-e woodcuts have been famous worldwide since the nineteenth century, but early etchings made by Japanese artists are hardly known outside of Japan. Only Shiba Kōkan’s work is widely known and discussed by Western print researchers. This essay presents a survey of the Japanese School of Etchers from 1783 to 1900. In that period, nearly a hundred Japanese printmakers created thousands of etchings appearing unmistakably in a style of their own. The etchings are discussed in the larger context of the introduction and use of Western printing and printmaking processes in Japan from the late sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century. The essay also examines the Dutch reference works that early Japanese etchers based their graphic techniques on, without any direct contact with European printmakers, and looks at how they developed these techniques independently, adapting local materials to Western intaglio printmaking processes.
J2021-E
J2021-E
Going dutch at Colombo: the earliest years of the British Government Press in Ceylon
1.05
Following the Dutch surrender of coastal territories in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to British forces in 1796, both the equipment and personnel of the Dutch East India Company’s press at Colombo fell into British hands. It was decided to retain the Dutch head printer and his assistants and even to ‘go Dutch’ in imitating exactly the style of printing for official proclamations, simply substituting English text for Dutch. This proved to be not merely a temporary expedient while the Sri Lankan territories were administered by the English East India Company from Madras but a practice that persisted for several decades – even after Sri Lanka was administered directly by the British Crown through a Governor, the first of whom was appointed in 1798. This paper traces the press’s operations between 1798–1812, and examines the proclamations that constituted the ‘building blocks’ of British governance for Sri Lanka covering the administration of justice, land ownership, economy and taxation, political relations, religion, and social issues including slavery.
J2021-authors
J2021-authors
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
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Ulrike Stark is Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD from the University of Bamberg and received her Habilitation in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Heidelberg in 2004. Stark taught at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University for more than a decade before she joined the University of Chicago in 2005. Her research focuses on modern Hindi literature, South Asian book history, and the cultural and intellectual history of North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of An empire of books: the Naval Kishore Press and the diffusion of the printed word in colonial India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008) and has published widely on Hindi and Urdu print culture. She is the co-creator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project titled ‘Chapakhana: mapping the spread of print in South Asia’.
1.02
James A. Flath is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He graduated with a PhD in History (Modern China) from the University of British Columbia in 2000. His first monograph, The cult of happiness: nianhua, art, and history in rural North China (UBC Press, 2004) examined the world of the North China village through the medium of folk print (nianhua), and he has expanded on that theme through subsequent articles on related topics examining the theme of ‘alternate modernity’. His second area of research is in museums, monuments, and heritage conservation sites. His monograph, Traces of the sage: monument, materiality, and the first temple of Confucius (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) studies China’s principal monument to Confucius – Kong Temple in the sage’s hometown of Qufu. His current research focuses on effects of natural and manmade disaster on Chinese architectural heritage.
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Vaibhav Singh is an independent typographer, type designer, and researcher. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture (University of Pune) and a master’s in Visual Communication (Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay). He was awarded the Felix scholarship in 2010 for an MA in Typeface Design, and again in 2013 for his PhD, both at the University of Reading, UK. He has worked as a typographer and exhibition designer in Mumbai, Delhi, and Panjim, and specialises in designing typefaces for Indian scripts.
As a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, his research focused on design, technology, aspects of printing history and multilingual typography. For his research projects, he has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the Printing Historical Society, the Design History Society, the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, the Smithsonian Institution, and the British Library, among others.
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Ad Stijnman (PhD University of Amsterdam, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London) is a professional printmaker and scholar of historical printmaking processes specialising in manual intaglio printmaking techniques. He has lectured and published widely on the subject, including his seminal Engraving and etching 1400–2000: a history of the development of manual intaglio printmaking processes (2012), for which he was awarded the Karel van Manderprijs 2015 for outstanding Dutch art historical publications. Together with Elizabeth Savage he co-edited Printing colour 1400–1700: history, techniques, functions and receptions (2015), which was awarded an honourable mention for best books on print by the IFPDA in 2016. His curatorial activities include exhibitions on medieval prints, early modern colour prints, and Rembrandt etchings on Japanese paper.
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Graham Shaw is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was formerly Head of the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections at the British Library. Among his many achievements are leading the ‘Collect Britain’ project, the British Library’s largest digitisation initiative at that time, and devising and directing the Endangered Archives Programme for its first five years.
In 2010 Graham Shaw retired from the British Library, having been Head of the Library’s Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections (APAC) for over twenty years. Trained as an Indologist, he graduated in Hindi and Sanskrit in 1969 from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS).
For the past thirty years he has researched the history of printing and publishing in South Asia, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. His published works include Printing in Calcutta to 1800 and The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB): Stage-1, 1556–1800.