March 12–13, 2020 @ Foster 3CT
More details here: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/qfml/
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw much interest on the part of writers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, scholars and politicians in and around the Middle East/Southwest Asia in language and the role of languages in a modern or rapidly modernizing world. This interest yielded complex discussions and debates around notions such as nation, empire, modernity, authenticity, temporality, and civilization. Intellectuals, reformers, poets, journalists, scientists, and political figures engaged in imagining and articulating the parameters by which an individual’s belonging to a particular community should be determined. For many, modernity entailed that language, history, culture and/or race, rather than religion, were the determinants of social organization. In these contexts, debates about the origins of languages, language families, the genealogies of languages, and even the details of grammatical systems became connected, on the one hand, to interests in archeology, in ancient Near Eastern history and in ideas about civilizations (their rise, decline, and renewal through reform and revival), and on the other to emerging ideologies about the role of language in the life and wellbeing of individuals and communities. While the Middle East and its geopolitical context of this period was a multilingual space, ideas regarding monolingualism and purity occupied the print cultures that emerged within it, and informed political projects with transformative/generative aspirations such as Zionism, Pan-Arabism and Pan-Turanianism.
Our workshop deals with these new understandings of languages in Middle Eastern modern contexts. Looking at Arabic, Ottoman-Turkish, Turkish, and Hebrew we ask the following questions: How did actors in the region signify the meanings of a modern language/speaker, and the relationship between different languages? How do intellectuals, linguists, poets, political activists, and religious reformers conceptualize notions of language purity and language reform? What kind of linguistic theories guided them? How did they understand the relationship between language, history, culture, civilization, and reform? What other theories, relating to nation, race, and reform, influence their conceptualizations? How did their theorizing relate/interact with practical political concerns such as empire management and nation building? How are the imaginations of different pasts, and different ancient Middle Eastern antiquities, as well as new visions for the future, influence the thinking about language and relationship between languages?