Moveable Type: A Syrian Press from São Paulo and Ottoman Constitutional Culture, 1908-1914

• In Event: La Huella Asiática en América Latina: Agency, Transnational Politics, and International Identities

Abstract

Just weeks after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution restored constitutional rule to Ottoman Syria, a crate arrived in Homs. It contained an Arabic printing press, donated by Syrian émigrés in São Paulo to a local political club called Jamaʿiyyat al-Rabita al-Adabiyya [the Literary Society]. The first private press to appear in Homs, the machine quickly became the focal point for Syrian political debate. The Literary Society printed their broadsides, pamphlets, and petitions there. By day, it produced Homs newspaper, a serial connected to Syria’s reform movement, which advocated for Syrian administrative autonomy, federalism, and home-rule. Homs newspaper was a transnational publication, its authorship split between Homsis living “at home” and émigrés in São Paulo.
Using materials printed in Homs newspaper between the 1908 and 1914, this paper argues that printing was a means by which Syrians around the world created transnational political networks and debated new political ideas like autonomy, home-rule, and constitutional federalism. From Brazil, Syrian émigrés translated the country’s own experience with republicanism for the benefit of compatriots at home. Meanwhile, political societies emerging in Homs organized across the diaspora and depended on funding from abroad. By World War I, the Literary Society shifted from a reformist association into an auto-emancipatory secret society promoting armed revolt against the Ottomans. By tracing the organization’s origins before the war, this paper assesses the press’s role in the formation of a transnational politics of autonomy and dissent.

Author

• Stacy D Fahrenthold, Williams College