Wen-chin Ouyang: 'Spectacle, spectator, spectacular: exuberant multilingualism in the 19th century Arabic print culture'

Wen-chin Ouyang: 'Spectacle, spectator, spectacular: exuberant multilingualism in the 19th century Arabic print culture'

How may multilingualism inherent in one seemingly monolithic language be theorized? Can a history of the multilingual, as well as multicultural, context be helpful? And, what would be the definition of culture, therefore, multicultural and multuralism, in this instance? More importantly, what bearing does the notion of ‘multilingualism inherent in a language’, particularly in the case of ‘metropolitan’ languages, have on thinking about ‘world literature’? Locating my discussion of these questions in the exuberant 19th century Arabic print culture, with particular reference to ‘Abou Naddarah’, a body of journals published in Cairo and Paris between 1878 and 1906, I look at this material (written in Arabic and French, using both high, middle and colloquial Arabic, and supplementing words with images) through and beyond the prism of ‘circulation’ proposed in ‘world literature’ and consider the ways in which multilingualism thrives in cultural encounters and conceptual blending. I argue, on this occasion, that the opening up of ‘classical Arabic’, if there is such a thing, to a new plurality in the 19th century, may best be articulated through an examination of sites on which discourses on cross-cultural encounters focalize. An example is ‘naddarah’, or spectacles, a material object that comes with a set of scientific underpinnings about sight, perspective and vision. On this site, encounters between Arabic and French, classical genres and print culture, and literature and science, come together to energize a new form of multilingualism in the Arabic language.