Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is all but forgotten. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by a portrait painter named Selim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the Palestinian postcolonial theorist Edward Said. This paper brings these three competing accounts together as the first steps toward charting the typewriter’s global cultural history. The Arabic typewriter, it finds, may be turned to many purposes: in these narratives it becomes by turn tool, a gift, a debt, a commodity, and an icon of cultural and territorial loss. Consistently, however, it is co-opted into the twentieth century’s intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeds its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it is written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. Particular names and places recur: Palestine, New York, even Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter’s origin-stories, I ask whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history, one that is itself uncanny and estranged.
Hannah Scott Deuchar is a Senior Lecturer (U.S. Associate Professor) in Arabic and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD in 2021 from NYU and is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow joint-hosted by EUME and Freie Universität Berlin. Her first monograph, Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press in 2026 and explores translation’s central role in the making and contestation of colonial law. Her work on Arabic literature, cultural history, and typography has appeared in edited volumes as well as in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Comparative Literature Studies, Comparative Literature, and International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Beatrice Gründler is Professor of Arabic at the Freie Universität Berlin. She received her PhD from Harvard University and was previously a professor at Yale University. Her areas of research include Arabic codicology, the history of the Arabic language, classical Arabic poetry and its social context, early Arabic book-culture viewed within the history of media, and the role of classical Arabic literature at the crossroads of premodern global literature. She is the author of The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century (1993, Arabic trans. 2004), Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rūmī and the Patron’s Redemption (2003), The Life and Times of Abū Tammām (Akhbār Abī Tammām) by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (2015), and The Rise of the Arabic Book (2020).
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