Cornell University

29 East Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

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Dr. Verlato's lecture, "The Politics of Script: Romanizing the Arabic Language in Modern Egypt," investigates alternative geographies of script reform that supersede the national framework by recuperating early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Egypt. It focuses on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897, relating them to the responses they elicited from the magazine's readers and some of the romanization practices found in advertising, commercial displays in the streets, and governance at the time. Romanized Arabic was envisioned as an original way to pursue financial profit and technological efficiency, confront European knowledge production, and redefine the standing of Arabic within transregional publishing networks that encompassed different languages and alphabets.

Speaker: Olga Verlato, Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Near Eastern Studies

Discussant: Cristina Florea, Assistant Professor, Department of History

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:

  • March 18 - Annette Damayanti Lienau, Assistant Professor at Harvard University
  • April 29 - Hannah Scott Deuchar, Assistant Professor at Queen Mary University of London

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

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