“Black Arabic”: A Conversation on Arabic Dialects in Sub-Saharan Africa
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“The majority of the world’s Arabic Speakers inhabit Africa and its diasporas. So why is much of continental Africa absent in Arabic language curricula?” Inspired by the article “In Search of African Arabic” by Dr. Vaughn Rasberry of Stanford University, this event aims to provide a space to discuss the invisibility of African dialects of Arabic in Arabic language and culture instruction while also broadening our conception of the Arabic-speaking world by shedding light onto Sub-Saharan African dialects of Arabic.
Please join the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the MENA Forum on Monday, February 21st at 7:00 pm EST for this conversation with guest speakers Dr. Vaughn Rasberry and Bentley Brown, a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. This conversation is organized and moderated by Nisrine Hilizah, M.A. Arab Studies (’23).
Nisrine Hilizah (MAAS’23) was born in Khartoum, Sudan. In 2000, she and her family (now from South Sudan) immigrated to the US from Lebanon as refugees. In May 2021, she graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South with a degree in International & Global Studies and a minor in Women & Gender Studies. During her undergraduate career, she participated in the US Department of State’s Critical Languages Scholarship Program for the study of Arabic in Morocco in 2019 (in-person) and 2020 (remote). After her time in Morocco in 2019, she spent the following semester studying Syrian refugee integration and humanitarian aid in Jordan and Switzerland. Inspired by her experience as a Black woman in Morocco, Jordan, and later, Egypt, her undergraduate thesis analyzes the ways in which anti-blackness intersects with other forms of discrimination to hinder Sudanese refugees in Jordan from accessing humanitarian aid and integrating into their host society. In the MAAS program, she hopes to continue exploring the history and development of anti-blackness in the Arab World and its impact on Black Sub-Saharan African refugees and asylum seekers in the region today. Upon graduating from MAAS, Nisrine hopes to find a career in humanitarianism..
Dr. Vaughn Rasberry is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. Dr. Rasberry studies African American and African Diaspora literature, twentieth-century American fiction, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. He serves as the Director of Academic Programs for Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 2016, Harvard University Press published his first book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination, recipient of the American Political Science Association’s 2017 Ralph Bunche Award (“awarded annually for the best scholarly work in political science on ethnic and cultural pluralism”). His book also received a 2017 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He holds a Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in English language and literature, an M.A. from the University of Chicago in Humanities. and a B.A from Howard University in English language and literature.
Bentley Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Brown is a filmmaker and musician with research interests in language and the technological mediation of memory. His fiction and nonfiction films deal largely with the psychology of cross-cultural migration and identity, particularly in his childhood home of Chad, and later experiences in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Prior to starting his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado Boulder, Brown was a lecturer in filmmaking and interactive media at Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He holds an MA in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University and a BA in International Studies from Emory University.
This event is made possible thanks to funding support from a U.S. Department of Education Title VI Grant for Georgetown University as a National Resource Center-MENA. Please submit any requests for accommodation by February 15, 2021. A good faith effort will be made to accommodate any requests made after that date. This event will have auto-captioning provided by Zoom. Header image illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines.