CANCELLED: “Postcolonial Futures and the Battle for Meaning” with Dr. Annette Damayanti Lienau

The scheduled event with Dr. Annette Damayanti Lienau has been cancelled due to unexpected illness. Dr. Lienau is unfortunately unable to travel to UNC at this time, but we hope to reschedule the talk and welcome her to campus in the fall.

We at CMEIS apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your understanding.

 

Original Event Description:

Literary responses to mass protests offer unique insights into the uneven terrain of revolutionary change, where political transitions are contested not only in the streets but also in the realm of cultural production. This lecture explores how writers in Indonesia and Egypt have grappled with the legacies of their countries’ recent democratic transitions—from the May 1998 uprising to the Arab Spring—by experimenting with form, language, and historical narration. How do authors deploy fiction, poetry, and satire to reflect on the successes, failures, and unfinished work of past protest movements? This talk considers Indonesia and Egypt—two nations historically connected through Asian-African solidarity initiatives—as critical sites for understanding how literature navigates the legacies of revolutionary change and how writers envision postcolonial futures in the 21st century.

Professor Lienau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Lienau’s core research uses the legacy of the Arabic language as a lens for comparative studies of post-colonial literature, offering an alternative approach to framing national literatures in Asia and Africa through primarily European colonial influences. Her first book Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures was published with Princeton University Press in 2024. She is currently working on a second book on twenty-first century revolutionary movements and their cultural afterlives, focusing on the literary impact of anti-authoritarian protest movements in Egypt and Indonesia towards the turn of the 21st century.

Her research has been supported through fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and Mellon Foundation. Lienau’s work has appeared in the journals PMLA, Comparative Literature, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Her first book is the subject of a forthcoming essay forum in the journal Comparative Literature Studies. Trained at Yale, Middlebury, and the American University in Cairo, her research uses creative combinations of languages—Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Indonesian, and Wolof—to uncover historical connections across Asia and Africa. She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, Indonesia, Senegal, France, and the Netherlands.