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Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures

Online ISBN:
9780691249889
Print ISBN:
9780691249803
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures

Annette Damayanti Lienau
Annette Damayanti Lienau

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Harvard University
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
9 January 2024
Online ISBN:
9780691249889
Print ISBN:
9780691249803
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

This book offers a new understanding of Arabic's global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas. The book presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa and Asia as a language of Islamic ritual and precolonial commerce, assumed a transregional role as an anticolonial literary medium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining how major writers and intellectuals across several generations grappled with the cultural asymmetries imposed by imperial Europe, the book shows that Arabic—as a cosmopolitan, interethnic, and interreligious language—complicated debates over questions of indigeneity, religious pluralism, counter-imperial nationalisms, and emerging nation-states. Unearthing parallels from West Africa to Southeast Asia, the book argues that debates comparing the status of Arabic to other languages challenged not only Eurocentric but Arabocentric forms of ethnolinguistic and racial prejudice in both local and global terms.

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