Meandering Through the Magazine

Abstract

In the context of the Middle East, conventionally, ‘new media’ have been viewed as digital media that have emerged over roughly the past two to three decades. The advent of any new medium has always disrupted the affordances of existing media—a fact widely recognized in historically inflected media studies. My paper explores the illustrated magazine in interwar Egypt. In this case the form of the printed artifact itself necessitated novel reading practices; this made it both distinctive in the field of print culture, and legible by means used to analyze audiovisual and digital media. I explore the illustrated magazine through a close reading of a single issue of al-Ithnayn, a popular variety magazine from the mid-1930s; I show how such concepts as flow, remediation and hypertextuality help us understand the cultural and sensory impact of such materials, and particularly their key position between audiocentric and ocularcentric reading cultures. The significance of al-Ithnayn cannot be reduced to a generic instantiation of what had by that time become a global medium. It also expressed social tensions of its time and facilitated readers’ own negotiations with a broad emergence of new media beyond the magazine itself.