What makes print colonial? Across varied colonial contexts, print inhabits a series of double-lives. It functions as a global technology linked within transnational circuits of exchange but also as one whose historical specifics – linguistic or legal, economic or cultural, intellectual or commercial – are, by necessity, articulated within the weighted power of imperial-colonial relationships. Consequently, much of the scholarship on print examines the medium through frameworks that focus on negotiations within particular networks of rule; given this, colonial histories of the medium are disproportionately focused on examining proto-nationalism in print circuits. Our workshop proposes examining the logic of print in comparative colonial contexts, so that we can ask new questions about both print and colonialism that move beyond traditional intra-imperial framing. We aim to do this by focusing comparatively on practices – the practices developed by the multiple actors inhabiting the world of print. These practices, we suspect, emerged out of very specific social configurations yet reflected how print’s agents and protagonists recognized the “needs” of imperial information gathering, dissemination, and control.

Some of the themes participants are invited to explore include (but are not limited to):

· Legal frameworks (regulation, censorship, self-censorship)

· Commercial logics (creation of economic networks, including through privileges, patronage and/or market forces)

· Politics of circulation (of texts and information, technologies, technical knowledge, images and aesthetics; relationship between print made “here” vs. “there;” print’s interface with other media/forms of communication/orality)

· Social formations (promotion or reorientation of literate culture, alphabetization of indigenous languages, intersection with religious power, print as an aspect of colonial subject formation)

· Political networks (use of print to support or challenge political regimes, as a component of colonial political culture)

Finally, we invite participants to think about how colonialism either remakes pre-colonial realities or lives on in post-colonial and contemporary print culture, including in legal systems, language politics, publishing realities/market structures, and cultural attitudes or issues of access.