Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference by Annette Damayanti Lienau

Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference by Annette Damayanti Lienau

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal Sacred 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.

"For Lienau, the idea that Arabic is a closed language, resisting translation by virtue of its status as the Islamic language of prophetic revelation, is manifestly belied by the modern history of Arabic and its relation to literatures across cultural and linguistic divides. . . [Lienau] forcefully illustrates that the Orientalist position of Islam’s antagonism toward diversity and Quranic Arabic’s essential untranslatability are rooted not in historical fact but racist fantasy."---Henry Clements, Public Books

Annette Damayanti Lienau is assistant professor of comparative literature at Harvard University.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780691249834
ISBN 10	0691249830
Titel	Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference
Autor	Annette Damayanti Lienau
Serie	Translation Transnation
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Princeton University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2024-01-09
Seitenanzahl	400
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.