Global Histories of the Book

This class will consider the idea and history of “the book” through history and around the world. Its primary objective is to introduce students to major topics and questions in “book history” while working to 1) resist the discipline’s traditional interest in modern European print culture and 2) situate that interest in global and transhistorical contexts. Learning about the histories of books and writing in different eras and parts of the world will go hand-in-hand with critical examinations of how and why those histories have been periodized and narrativized the way they have. Although “book” is a technological category, we will consider how helpful technological narratives and comparisons of book practice and culture are. We will also engage not only in transhistorical and transnational comparisons of book culture and practice, but also examine the global book as a postcolonial phenomenon, marked by patterns of influence, appropriation and imposition across time and space. This course will perforce be not comprehensive but instead oriented around case studies: we will be unable to examine every stage of every nation’s book history in detail. Rather, we will focus on objects and scholarly case studies that illuminate both the history and methods involved, and on productive points of contact. We will visit libraries and examine books both in person and through virtual simulacra. What does it mean to tell “global” histories of the book? For our purposes, it means not assuming that the terms, categories, or periods of modern western book history should be definitive for other times and places. It also means examining the way that book cultures participated in and were shaped by patterns of exchange, conquest and colonization. We will explore points of contact across time as well as space. By the end of the semester, students will be able to speak to the history of the book across several cultures and linguistic traditions, speak comparatively to dimensions of book practice in two cultures, and be able to present the history and comparative dimensions of a chosen object from Columbia’s special collections. Students will also become acquainted with the use of special collections libraries.