Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference, and Counter-Imperial Writing from the Arabophone to the Asian-African (19th-20th C.)

FAIN: FEL-273298-21

Annette Damayanti Lienau
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

Research and writing leading to a book on how Arabic became a counter-imperial and transregional language that connected African and Asian in the 19th-20h centuries.

This project challenges prevailing paradigms in the fields of comparative and post-colonial studies of Asian and African literature. While scholars in post-colonial studies tend to focus on how literatures have developed in response to European imperial influences, this book emphasizes how writers across imperial and regional lines also incorporated or responded to a scriptural Arabic literary sensibility. The project traces how Arabic—as a transregional, inter-ethnic, and inter-religious language—became intertwined with important debates about ethnolinguistic egalitarianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with underexamined implications for the politics of post-colonial culture. Drawing from case studies of Senegalese, Egyptian, and Indonesian writing, and incorporating sources in Arabic, French, Wolof, and Indonesian, the project offers a new perspective on the emergence of twentieth-century counter-imperial and national literatures.