Language Colonialism in the Americas vs. the Islamicate World and historicizing the concept of authorship

It was very insightful to read Mignolo's article on "Renaissance Theories of Writing..." as a comparative history to use up against what I have previously thought of, read, and discussed about the Islamicate context. The clash between renaissance/European concepts of the book and writing played out very differently in the 16th century Americas than it did in 19th century Levant, but in both cases the ideology of the book came to suppress and distort literary histories and traditions that did not conform to the European model. In the American context, this meant not only the ignoring of a sophisticated repertoire of oral discursive types of texts (the mention of this in the text is so mysterious and captivating, what were these genres of performative speech and registers of literary orality which have vanished in history?!), but the disregard of things that were actually written due to the fact that they did not take place within the ideologically sanctified confines of a bounded book.  The misleading translation to book for the Mayan "amoxtli" and the Incan "Vuh" are given as examples of this  stubborn closed-mindedness to texts written on other surfaces. We are lucky that the Castilians mainly ignored mayan writing on stone surfaces, even if their full meaning remains disclosed to us.

Although the Islamicate world was not a brand new "discovery" for the Europeans, and even though Arabic literary societies used alphabets and had over a thousand year history of canonical grammar texts, it did not fail to fall prey to the ideology of the book. Although manuscripts and other alternative forms of printed materials had huge circulation even among the middle class in "medieval" Islamic cultures (see "in praise of books" by Nelly Hanna"), the lack of discrete literary works being produced in book form during the early modern period was the reason why late 19th century thinkers looked back and judged the 500 intervening years since the end of the Abbasid Empire as the age of decadence (عصر الانحطاط). As has been shown in many recent works such as that on literary salons by Samer Ali, recitations and performative forms of literary activity actually had medieval centers like Cairo and Damascus awash in literary activity — arguably more than now. Arab revivalists in the late 1800s attempted to jump-start their own renaissance (the nahda) upon a retroactive fiction that was mainly constructed upon the ideology of books. 

However, one aspect of the ideology of books that I would like to add to Mignolo's account is that of the concept of authorship. If the belief in the superiority of alphabetic writing and the form of the book went hand in hand in creating an ideology behind the colonization of language, then I would also add the belief that a legible written text as it appeared in a book also had to have a distinct identifiable author to be deemed legitimate. This again has to do more with writing as an "economic structure and political design," specifically the economic model of literary distribution centered around the printing press, than it does with the specifics behind writing systems. Much of medieval Islamicate literary output was rendered invisible by later men of letters because they did could not be associated with a historical personality. Often manuscripts during this period were commentaries, or rip-offs (without the pejorative context), re-writes, add-ons, or riffs on previously existing works. There were oceans (Links to an external site.)of literary, theological, philosophical activity taking place, but the output did not take the form of single tomes with one author and so were ignored by later scholars. I believe the situation would be similar for the Americas. One of the reasons oral traditions were disregarded must have been that their origins were not facilely identifiable.

This idea of authorship as a historically bound quality of literary production is interesting especially in light of new forms of literacy and production being witnessed online. Rather than single original works ascribed to an author being published by companies in a book form, think about all of the content we consume today that is a rip-off, re-write, add-on, or riff of previously existing works. The word meme comes to mind. The ability to read socially through apps like genius or good reads, the easing of claims of plagiarism brought about by the acceptance of "sampling" from hip hop culture, fan fiction, open source software, etc. are all bringing us back to a form of literary production more closely resembling the pre-Gutenberg era. Someone has even coined the term "the Gutenberg parenthesis" to describe the finite historical period in which we were caught up in believing only written books by one author were legitimate.