Annette Damayanti Lienau, assistant professor at Harvard University, will give a lecture, "Arabic Across Empires and the Making of Literary Traditions in Asia and Africa," on March 18 at 5pm in White Hall room 106. 

Professor Lienau will present from her recently published book "Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures" (Princeton University Press, 2024). Through a large-scale historical reconstruction of connections across Asia and Africa—encompassing literary evidence from the 1820s through the end of the twentieth century— the book illuminates how writing of the late colonial period gave the Arabic language and script new meaning across imperial lines: no longer merely a religious, sacralized language, it became a counter-imperial medium with important implications for 20th century cultural dynamics and rivalries. Her book traces this common pattern with the rise and fall of European empires (in the Dutch East Indies, French West Africa, and Egypt under British occupation), across regions conjoined by Arabic but in contact with languages and dialects of a broad geographical dispersion.

Lienau’s research uses creative combinations of languages—Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Indonesian, and Wolof—to uncover historical connections across Asia and Africa. Her core research uses the legacy of the Arabic language as a lens for comparative studies of post-colonial literature, offering an alternative approach to framing national literatures in Asia and Africa through primarily European colonial influences. Across regions conjoined by Arabic, her work engages with languages and dialects of a broad geographical dispersion, framed through colonial archives in French, English, and translated Dutch texts. 

Speaker: Annette Damayanti Lienau, assisant professor at Harvard University

Discussant: Deborah Starr, professor at Cornell University

The "Language and Power in the Middle East and Beyond" lecture series explores the relation between language, politics, and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective, with case studies that range from Senegal to Indonesia, and from late Ottoman print networks to postcolonial literatures. Save the date for the next lectures in the series:

• April 29 - Hannah Scott Deuchar, Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London

Photo: Petition asking for pardon for Dinshaway prisoners, detail (1906-7). Abbas Hilmi II Papers, Durham University Library.

Sponsors: Klarman Fellowship program, Department of Near Eastern Studies

Co-sponsors: Comparative Muslim Societies Program, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Society for the Humanities