ABSTRACT
This book has addressed a plurality of print cultures, even while recognising that it would be impossible to embrace all the techniques or sites of printing in culture. Its approach has been synthetic and cross-disciplinary, developed from the author’s own particular research and teaching interests in the social and cultural politics attaching to the production and reproduction of visual representations. The method of presentation, using specific, local examples of sometimes humble printed items is deliberate and informed by the belief, as Judy Attfield has it, that a ‘self-aware, decentred standpoint’ is a good way to encounter hidden histories (Attfield 2000: 53). In this approach, we see that print culture cannot be reduced to one narrative; for example the introduction of print culture in the Middle East or in India did not necessarily lead to the development of a Western humanist mindset, but was instead often adopted in order to attack colonial rule or secular values. In addition, as we have seen, ‘print culture’ (as a kind of slogan) has also often been espoused by particular groups within the business of print, whether by printing house workers, publishers or academics, leading to very different characterisations of what print culture might be; and in the process, these views have often been attached to different mediums and visual languages. But below these assured professional voices, many printed objects have been produced in more informal circumstances or in different working spheres. Against the more powerful expression of designers and associated discourses of exhibitions, academic monographs and critical commentaries, we have seen that discredited, outdated and ‘merely decorative’ items also have weight. The example of chromolithographs, whether in women’s social exchanges in domestic spaces or in the development of ‘photos of the gods’ in India in the late nineteenth century (Pinney 2004), show that the worthy ideals of a single, progressive ‘print culture’ are simply the good taste of the ruling caste.
