Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference : Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures / Annette Damayanti Lienau.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lienau, Annette Damayanti, author.

Series:

Translation/transnation ; Volume 52.

Translation/Transnation Series ; Volume 52

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Arabic language--Political aspects--History.

Arabic language.

Languages in contact.

Nationalism and literature.

Egypt--Intellectual life.

Egypt.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (401 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2023]

Summary:

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and SenegalSacred Language, Vernacular Difference 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.Annette Damayanti Lienau 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, Lienau 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, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction Arabic as a Contact Language

I Reframing the Arabophone

1 Orientalism and Muslim Diversity

2 Thresholds of Arabness

3 Arabic Mastery and Racial Parity

4 Arabic as a Counterimperial Symbol

Section II Vernacular Difference and Emerging Nationalisms

5 Vernacular Revolutions

6 Between Pride and Humility

7 After Empire: Segregations

Section III Connected Histories and Competing Literacies

8 Margins of a Muslim World

9 Pluralism Sanctified

Conclusion: Comparative Literature and Transregional Arabophone Studies

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Lienau, Annette Damayanti Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference

ISBN:

9780691249889

0691249881

OCLC:

1410592604