Hofmeyr 2013

Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhi's Printing Press. Harvard UP, 2013

Introduction

• 4: These experiments unfolded in an age of vertiginous acceleration via trains, steamships, and telegraphs, where, with mounting intensity, an industrialized information order bombarded readers with more and more printed matter. Ever-briefer media genres like the headline, summary, and extract speeded up tempos of reading. In Gandhi's view, such reading "macadamized" the mind (to use an image from Thoreau that appeared in Indian Opinion on June 10, 1911) and reinforced the dangerous equation of speed with efficiency.
• 8: The epic mobility of C19 imperialism, of which these kaleidoscopic communities formed a part, engendered a rich array of transnational imaginings [as between Muslim communities in colonial Africa and India], as displaced and dispersed communities had to envisage their position in a new orer. With its deep history of maritime mobility, the Indian Ocean world fostered an especially rich array of transnational associational forms[.]
  • Rochelle Pinto, Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa
• 13: In relying on the periodical and the pamphlet, Gandhi was not unusual - these were the forms of empire par excellence. A cut-and-paste assemblage of publications from elsewher, the periodical on every page convened a miniature empire.
  • Cf. Burton and Hofmeyr 2014
• 14: Saturated with "commodity-ness," the newspaper represents the end point of a world where the print industry emerged as one of the earliest forms of capitalist enterprise, inducting textual objects as one of the first full commodity forms.
• 17: Imperial modernity relied on summary, telegram, telegraph, clipping, and extract for its operations.

Sources to find

• Simon J Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System
• Choudhury, Telegraphic Imperialism
• Kelly J. Mays, "The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals," Literature in the Marketplace.
• Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial
• Binckes, "Lines of Engagement," Little Magazines and Modernism