Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.

This provides the rationale for the book and outlines the main argument. It provides a synopsis of the eight chapters and the conclusion. The central argument of the book is made explicit: the need to move beyond existing tropes, especially religion, that have defined Sikh subjectivities. It outlines the integrated approach to Sikh nationalism, identity and diaspora which offers a more comprehensive understanding of Sikh aspirations for self-determination since the late nineteenth century. The Sikh case, it suggests, provides new insights into minority religious nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial contexts and questions the centrality of the homeland in the discourse of long-distance nationalism in a globalised world, thus making possible de-territorialised nationalism.

Overview is inseparable from its retrospective dimension in any look back on the evolution of the codex under shifting technical conditions, from moveable type to pixel backlight. A “cross-sectional” approach to the book/text/medium triad involves chapters arranged here in three respective pairs. First (Part I): the plastic art of the codex, divided between the graphics of easel treatment and conceptual book sculpture. Next (Part II): in close comparison with such material form, an intensive reading of phonemic wording – in its mediating linguistic texture – thrown into relief by visual rather than verbal “signage” in narrative cinema as an alternative time-based medium. Finally (Part III): the ontology of human speech pursued, over against its media ideology, by contemporary theorists Giorgio Agamben and Friedrich Kittler. The introduction also looks back on the “speakwrite” in George Orwell’s 1984 as a mode of dictation contrasted with the transgressive sensuality of handwriting on outmoded paper pages early in the novel.