New Perspective on Asia-Africa Connection through Arabic Language

HUMANIORA – (9/6/2023) - The prestigious academic event, Annual International Conference on Language, Literature and Media (AICOLLIM), presented its main session on Wednesday, September 6, 2023, featuring Dr. Annette Damayanti Lienau, an assistant professor in the Comparative Literature program at Harvard University. In this main session, Dr. Lienau delivered a highly interesting theme, "Connecting Asia-Africa through Arabic: From Inter-imperiality to World Literature."

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In her presentation, Dr. Lienau described the complexity of the Arabic language's role in connecting the two continents, Asia and Africa, and its rich history. She highlighted that Muslim society is divided into two very different classes: Muslims literate in European languages and Muslims literate in Arabic languages. During her offline presentation, a Wellesley College alumna argued that the first group tends to develop with exposure to European languages, while the second group tends to remain exclusively connected to the Qur'an through the use of religious languages like Arabic, Persian, or Turkish.

In the same context, Dr. Lienau also noted that during Indonesia's struggle for independence, hardly anyone in Indonesia used Indonesian as their mother tongue. Most people had their respective ethnic languages, and some, especially those involved in the nationalist movement, also used Indonesian/Malay. However, she pointed out that today, there are millions of young Indonesians from various ethnolinguistic backgrounds who consider Indonesian as their mother tongue.

The presentation delivered by Dr. Lienau received a warm welcome from the participants of AICOLLIM 5, providing an in-depth analysis of the crucial role of language in shaping connections between diverse cultures in Asia and Africa.

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The conference remains a highlight in the academic and scholarly world, with Dr. Lienau's presentation being one of the plenary sessions in the series of events that will continue for the next two days. [al]