HumCore Workshop #6: Beyond Cartography, Beyond Arabic
Transcript
Alexander Key:
Okay, let me welcome everybody to this, the final workshop in our series of workshops this quarter, where we've been talking about global humanities education. But, and this is very much the purpose of this final workshop, which is in the most important concluding spot is that we're only interested in the education aspect in as much as it reflects our own research conceptualizations. This isn't a world in which there's something we think, and then something separate that we teach. We want the way that we think and conceptualize things in our research to then just naturally be reflected in our teaching. But the research comes first, I think it's fair to say. Which is why the final workshop in the series with professors Grant Parker and Annette Lienau is focused on what our conceptions are as scholars of this question of the global that gets banded around and that we've been talking about over the year.
Alexander Key:
So it's a tremendous pleasure and an honor to introduce two of the people I think are the most exciting scholars in this space, at the moment. Annette Lienau is a professor of comp lit at Harvard and her work on Arabic and her current book project on sacred language, vernacular difference, global Arabic and counter-imperial Asian and African literatures is asking this question that Arabists like me and comp lit have been asking forever, but don't really have the tools or the skill set or the methodological ability to do. What does it really mean to have Arabic as this global Imperial language that influences all these other languages and literatures, I'm incredibly excited to hear more about the book and to read it when it comes out and then to read the next book on cultural literacy in Indonesia and Egypt. It's work that no one else is doing or is really capable of. It's incredibly exciting.
Alexander Key:
Then professor Grant Parker, our own Grant Parker at Stanford, who's the person who I think, I don't want to cast dispersions on the rest of my colleagues by saying this, but I don't think anyone else at Stanford is as advanced in their thinking about the global humanities as Grant Parker. He was working on these questions of conceptualizing the Mediterranean and thinking about texts and connections long before anybody else was. He's now teaching courses in the humanities core that integrate ancient South Asia and Africa, and he's also the inspiration and the driving force behind this workshop series, which would never have happened had Grant not suggested it. So it's very exciting. I can't wait to hear what both of you are going to say into the conversation. So is it okay Annette if you go first for 15 minutes or so, and then I'll pass it over to Grant, and then Annette will get another five minutes to respond to Grant and then vice versa, and then we'll open it up for Q-&-A. Thanks very much. It's all yours.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Thank you so much. I don't have a formal title for my presentation. So I'll just remark from the outset, the few general points of focus that I'll be moving through in the 15 or so minutes that I'll be speaking. So first I'll begin by speaking about some of the potential controversies that accompany the comparative framing of scriptural or Quranic Arabic inheritances in their coexistence with vernacular linguistic and literary forms. And then I'll next offer a few key points on how this dynamic has been politicized across former European Imperial lines and across the sites in which I work, across regional constraints and the sites in which I work include Senegal, Indonesia, and Egypt. Then I'll conclude with the suggestion on the further need for comparative and connective work in ways that I hope speak to some of the broader questions that have been raised through this series.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
So in the course of my research, I happened upon an anecdote sided from the travel log of an 18th-century Dutch merchant, who remarked that one could voyage without the help of a translator from the streets of Gibraltar connecting, of course, Spain and Morocco in the Eastern Mediterranean all the way to the streets of Malacca marking the Southeast Asian passage to the Pacific, if one had mastered a single language, Arabic. By the mid 20th century, that same naval route or transcontinental route, that same regional expanse would later be described by Indonesian president Sukarno, hosting the first conference of newly independent Asian and African states in 1955 as the bloodline or the main artery of European imperialism against which newly independent states were taking an ultimate stand through new or revived forms of lateral solidarity. So my research in part, bears these vantage points, these two vantage points in mind, from within a commercially or imperially expanding Europe and beyond in part to raise the following questions. The Arabic language had historically connected many regions across the transcontinental Asian and African space, but through what ideological grounds or prisms has that historical connection been interpreted?
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Given that the Arabic language across these regions coexisted with other languages, envisioned at times it compliments, at times as rivals, how might we frame those points of contact and coexistence? One way to think about why this is important is of course, through a broad comparative analogy. Scholars often in shorthand, frame the histories of European national cultures and rising vernacular language, literatures granted a belated period in the 19th century and thereafter, through their development against a Latin Imperial or an ecumenical tradition from a longer standpoint. So how then might the study of national and vernacular literatures developing within an Arabic scriptural context or former Imperial context compare? What implications might this have for how we historically think about cultural formations and post-colonial context are national cultures that are defined as transforming against two accents, both European colonial pressures and the cultural impact of scriptural or Quranic Arabic?
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Well, these questions at best underscore the promise of framing a comparative approach to linguistic and literary dynamics within a trans regional Arab [inaudible 00:07:36] context. They're of course not without their limitations or potential provocations. To an astute listener, the evolutionary framing of any potential comparison between ecumenical Latin or church Latin, scriptural Arabic, and there's supposedly later vernacular successors should itself raise questions for a few different reasons. For one, the notion that vernacular dialects where languages exist somehow in a belated evolutionary relationship to Quranic Arabic is belied by the enduring contemporaneity of scriptural Arabic as a global language, which is by no means in a state of decline. It is also belied by the historical interdependency of scriptural Arabic and vernacular languages in devotional exegetical and translational practice. Also by the earliest constitution of Arabic as a sacralized language or a ritual language emerging within a context of colloquial or vernacular diversity in the course of its revelation and standardization as a textual standard.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
A second point of suspicion, of course emerges when the assumptions that underlie this comparative question on scriptural Arabic and Latin or church Latin are read alongside certain [inaudible 00:09:02] status of vernacular languages relative to what we now conventionally call classical or Quranic Arabic. These are of course, polemical concepts, in of themselves. By this, I mean, archival inheritances that reveal that the conflation of vernacularization with historical modernity or civilizational progress was itself a kind of colonial tendency, if not an orientalist trope. One might mention in this light, an exemplary passage in the Dufferin report penned by one of the earliest architects of the British occupation of Egypt in 1883, in a passage characterizing Quranic Arabic as historically obsolete, irrelevant to actual language use in Arabic, I'm sorry, in Egypt and useless for the needs of modern governance in colonial Egypt.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
To quote him directly. He wrote, "Modern Egyptian Arabic, there's the same relation to Quranic Arabic as Italian and modern Greek due to Latin and classic Greek." He went on to prophecy the following, to quote him, "There is little chance of much progress being made in educating the masses in Egypt until the children are taught the vulgar Arabic, instead of as a present Quranic Arabic." Other British officials would follow suit in their comparison of Quranic Arabic to a declining church Latin or classical Latin, opposing the alleged archaism of Quranic Arabic to the modern diversity of the region's vernaculars. Many of them favoring the latter over the former, even if Dufferin's and others arguments against the use of Quranic or classical Arabic in Egypt did not rise to the level of a uniformly enforced policy directive, given the very different priorities of the British occupation. This was not the case in other European colonies where a comparable bias against the use of Quranic Arabic within the sphere of political administration and public governance had far more corrosive effects on its use with an impact felt through the present day.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
One of the most striking cases of this can be found in French West Africa, towards the turn of the 20th century. A region that counted among its colonies present-day Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast among others. Although not the first colonial official to express concern about the Arabic orientation of Muslim subjects in French West Africa, the governor general of the region, William Merlaud-Ponty in 1911, in the wake of regional unrest in North Africa and Egypt, and in the lead up to the first world war noted with consternation, the prevalence of Arabic and judicial transcriptions and official correspondence with indigenous subjects and circulated a memorandum prohibiting the use of Arabic for all political and administrative purposes, claiming that it was a foreign language, and I quote, "Arabic only penetrates African countries through Muslim proselytism, for the black, it is the sacred language to indirectly oblige our subjects to learn the language in order to engage in official relations with us is tantamount to encouraging the propaganda of the voteries of the Quran, and thus oblige to prescribe administrative documents for all kinds, destined to the natives, be written in our language," by that, he meant French and a Latinx script.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
If the region's former French colonies have since become a bedrock of the French language, which is now the official language of many of the region's post-colonial states, the darker story of this entrenchment of French reveals the deliberate sidelining of Arabic, given colonial anxieties about its ideological violences. If these details suggest not only the measure of colonial anxieties regarding Arabic as a trans-regional language and a potential symbol or vehicle of opposition to European Imperial interests, they also emphasize the politicization of Quranic Arabic or that of the politicization of Quranic Arabic cannot be read in regional isolation or within the historical boundaries of a single empire. This is all the more true when we realized there was a certain degree of Islamic policy-sharing that occurred between colonial officials across Imperial lines at this time, intensifying particularly in the lead up to the first world war between key policy architects in the Dutch East Indies, what is now present day Indonesia, and in French West Africa, two regions in which the Arabic language and script came to be effectively sidelined from the realm of public political administration.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Although the subtle marginalization of Arabic in the Dutch East Indies began arguably in the early 19th century, a decisive turn in the public use of Arabic within the Indonesian context or proto-Indonesian context seems to have taken place in the wake of the 19th-century Aceh War and Islamist uprisings in North Sumatra. This religious unrest catalyzed a series of Dutch policy responses, which coincided with efforts to Romanized local languages like Acehnese and Malay, and to marginalize Arabic as a pedagogical language in script for a rising generation of Dutch-educated Indonesians. This was despite the fact that Arabic orthography had been used to transcribe local languages for centuries prior.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
One of the chief instigators of this process was none other than a Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, who sought to depoliticize Islam in the region, in the wake of these conflicts. And who believed that the distancing of a rising class of literate Indonesians from their devotional language would reorient Holland's most restive Muslim subjects towards the peaceable accommodation of Dutch interests.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Beyond the importance of these developments to contemporary Indonesians, presently the largest demographic muscle majority in a single country. The importance of reading these changes across Imperial Alliance is at least two virtues, not only first due to the fact that the architect of these policies, Snouck Hurgronje, was widely lauded in French orientalist circles in the 1900s and 1910s, and appears to have had an at least indirect impact on the direction of Islamic policy in French West Africa, through it appears his influence of a certain orientalist advisor, [inaudible 00:15:28]. From a different perspective, reading across Imperial lines throws into comparative relief also, British patterns of colonial occupation in the late 19th century. In Britain's relative commitment to a practice of indirect rule and non-interference in the realm of language politics. One of the signs of this is the family. If the Malay language in Indonesia came to disuse Arabic as a script in a late colonial period, this was not the case in the directly adjacent region of British-controlled Malaysia, where virtually the same language, Malay, continue to be transcribed in Arabic in the public domain well into the mid-20th century.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
This underscores that the fate of Arabic is a global language and script across many of Europe's former colonies depended on the historical accident of Imperial boundary drawing, particularly at a decisive period around the turn of the 20th century, the politicization of Arabic as a trans-regional language, and as coexistence with many local vernaculars is of course not only legible through the lens of colonial documents and anxiety. If several of the colonial figures, and orientalists previously mentioned marginalized, liturgical, scriptural Arabic, and intended to frame the relationship between local languages and scriptural Arabic or colloquial speech forms and scriptural Arabic in antagonistic terms, it's possible to see from an inverse perspective, how that relationship, the relationship between vernacular language forms and Quranic Arabic or ritual Arabic forms were often viewed as a matter of inescapable coexistence, even among writers across ideological spectrum, but even among writers with whom we might associate with the kind of religious or ideological conservatism, and these are the three examples I just mentioned very briefly.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Across the context with which I've referenced, for example, the founder of Senegal's most widespread Sufi order, Muridism, and Amadou Bamba fostered a generation of writers trained in Arabic who justified their use of the Wolo vernacular for their writing through reference to Quranic versus polyglossia as a sign of divinity. This is room 30, 22, which states I know his signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors. In a second example, one of Indonesia's major Muslim intellectuals in the mid-20th century by the name of Hum Ku, advocated for the return of Indonesian Malay to its allegedly originiary Arabic script by arguing for the fundamental complementary between Malay, vernaculars and liturgical Arabic, at times with reference to the very same Quranic verse. In Egypt where debates on Arabic literary and print standards and Egyptian colloquial speech became especially fraught in the wake of Britain's occupation.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
One could also find conservative defenders of Muslim linguistic diversity, and the sustainment of the literary standard tied to a Quranic inheritance. Literary critic and later idiolog of Muslim brotherhood, [inaudible], for example, a figure whose work translated into Indonesian, wrote in the 1930s that although the Egyptian colloquial maybe considered linguistically distinct from Quranic Arabic, Quranic Arabic had been transformative to the Egyptian national psyche and in the 1951 article later titled [inaudible] for the Arabic language in the Islamic world. He later argued that despite this polyglossia across the Muslim world, a transcontinental commitment to Arabic remained a major cause of cultural and epistemic freedom from the legacies of European imperialism. So as these brief examples demonstrate across Imperial divisions, the issue of Quranic Arabic and its punitive vernaculars needs to be reframed beyond teleological or evolutionary models that are overdetermined by European historical paradigms, if not by European orientalist distortions in reading this dynamic and multifaceted relationship.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
But our ability to trace that historical dynamic is plagued by several problems, not least due to the fact that the investigation of vernacular languages within trans-regional Arab reform contexts is really ill-suited to the present configuration of our respective disciplines. This is particularly true phenomenally non-Arab vernaculars, historically written in the Arabic script, of which there are legion numbers. How do we proceed with these barriers and limitations in mind and what kinds of insights then become visitable who were not constrained by them?
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
A couple of suggestions of relevance to comparative cultural and literary studies, for one, we need to think more critically about what categorically constitutes the vernacular within an arabophone context. I think this means the broader pursuit of connective work that encompasses not only what we call [inaudible] in the Middle East or dialects, but also categorically ajamians and former ajamians, that is non-Arabic, Arabic script languages or formerly Arabic script languages beyond Middle East.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
This is especially true, given that both arguably share of status as culturally creolized forms, relative to scriptural Arabic and given that their perceived difference potentially reflects both colonial-era taxonomies and precolonial hierarchies between a nominally Arab and non-Arab demographic, Arab and ajam. Secondly, given that the fate of the Arabic script is implicated in this connected history from Southeast Asian to Sub-Saharian African context, I think we need to work against the bias that still persists, likely inherited from orientalist taxonomies in both Southeast Asian and West Africa especially, that Arabic influences and Arabic orthographies are limited to Islamic studies, are generally traditional, archaic, obsolete, or amounting to a private religious median of limited or tenuous relevance to contemporary public culture and to post-colonial literary studies. I'll end there. Thank you so much.
Alexander Key:
Brilliant. Thank you, Annette. Now I'll pass it straight over to Grant.
Grant Parker:
Thank you very much, Annette. Thank you, Alexander. I can only disappoint you after such a generous introduction. I hope you can hear me. Okay, so thank you both and thank you everyone for coming along. So in taking up the question that Alexander has given us-
Grant Parker:
... I thought of using a map. This is a map that has tormented me and excited me for sometime, because it happens to encapsulate several interests of mine, which I have always thought of as a chance confluence, but maybe not. And of course, the fact that Annette has just spoken about Indonesia and about the Dutch and the colonial world is enormously heartening for me. So this is my text in a way, and being a map, of course, this is perhaps in the first, most obvious sense of visual, but it's also verbal. It's both art and science and technology. And I would like to dwell on that as a point of reflection on the texts that we have been discussing in this series, and I hope it will become clear where I am doing that. Here is the map.
Grant Parker:
It's only fair that I showed you in its full color. This is a map made in the late-16th century, in the low countries, by Ortelius -- the inventor of the Atlas, the inventor also of the historical map. In a sense, this is a map of a text from the, probably the time of the mid-1st century of the common era so that's, it's a high point of the Roman world. The Roman world now controlling the entire Mediterranean is able to promote a trade activity going all the way from Egypt to the west coast of India and down the African coast around the horn to roughly Zanzibar. This survives in a text in Koine Greek, so not classical Greek, but the form that became popularized with the Christian Bible and the form of later Greek literature. This is not a literary text.
Grant Parker:
It refers to Homer once, but otherwise it just lists the objects that you, if you were saving this route in the first century, before the common era with a monsoon, from the Red Sea this way, or down here, the objects that you would take into or take from any one port of call along the way. So it's a remarkable text. What caused my jaw to drop when I first became acquainted with this is that this map of the Indian Ocean is the framing map for an insert on the map of Odysseus. Who would have thought that the order of frames and insert would be in that direction?
Grant Parker:
So without saying too much more about it right now, I want to say that this brings up the kinds of issues that in which I can do my own little reflection on the topics we have discussed. And in many ways, following on what my colleague Vered Shemtov has already discussed in this series. We were part of the group that pioneered this series of thematic clusters. We were the first group, I'm sorry, two, to integrate our courses and to share half of them. And these were the topics. I'm just reviewing rehearsing what many of you will remember from Vered's talk about the topics and as a reminder of what kind of material comes into play by this juxtaposition? Well, perhaps [inaudible] juxtapositions -- is this figure of Iskandar. So this is the Persian inflection of the Alexander story.
Grant Parker:
And it is this kind of cross-cultural contact that is really what lights my fire. If that's not getting the game away too early, for me, this is the most exciting part of both the research and the teaching we might do with the kinds of texts that we have been dealing with. And I will offer one kind of a take on both a reflection on, and to some degree, rational of the discussions, standing from the discussions we had in designing this. But first, before we leave the map, let's just emphasize this idea that it's a map of the Indian Ocean that is used by this mapmaker in Antwerp in the late-16th century, just a few years before the foundation -- seven years, I guess, before the creation of the Dutch East India Company, which creates the economic world of this area for the 17th and 18th centuries.
Grant Parker:
So it's about frameworks. It's about place. But to give you an idea of what else is in this map here is the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian, a supposedly a text of the Carthaginians from the 5th century, before the common era of this Explorer, Hanna who sails [inaudible] beyond the pillars of Hercules and the sails down the African coast. This, again, a text also with Periplus, or we might say voyage in the title, but in a different part of the world, this too makes it onto Ortelius map of the Indian Ocean. We didn't bother about this one up here, because this is of the world as seen from the North Pole. But it's worth thinking about the southeast corner.
Grant Parker:
This came before some of the earliest Dutch visits to what we now call Australia. And you can see how schematized this conception is of Southeast Asia. Ampulus is as an author that is connected with Campanella's city of the sun. And there is a classical connection with Diodorus Siculus and Plato's Republic, of course. So there are a lot of things coming together here. And my question is how to link the issues that we have been thinking about continuities of time. So connections and comparisons and framing of supposed traditions. And here just as, here is, this is a map of the ancient trade route. And here is a picture of the rather grim looking Ortelius who died shortly before the Dutch East India company was founded.
Grant Parker:
It seems to me, as I reflect on what we have been discussing in this series, a great deal of what we are dealing with, we might call a balancing act, and I know we are supposed to avoid binaries, but we are dealing here with a balancing act between research and pedagogical approaches to the study of literature. And for classicists like me, there is a pedagogical default. And in fact, I don't know what, whether you could have the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature without some kind of implicit notion or precondition of a Canon. On the other hand, unexpected and broadening opportunities of how we might study connections. So, but there are many, many parts of this balancing act. We could think of it pedagogically as a smörgåsbord.
Grant Parker:
This is one way to think of the catalog of courses ... that our undergraduate students are confronted with from which they need to take a course. And how do you get coherence out of this? Another model to think about the pedagogy is involved would be of central Rome in his study. And this is a depth as opposed to a breadth here is a cross that might be imagined because it seems to stand there unsupported with all the intensity of the translator, the scholar, the philologist, and the leader of the church that [inaudible] was. So these are very, very different models of how to consume texts, how to engage with texts.
Grant Parker:
The balancing act could involve comparison or connection. It could involve ancients and moderns. Ancients and moderns is really what I do. So from that point of view, I really actually struggled a little bit with the structure of our humanities course, which in a superficially restricted us to the early period and the collaboration that we developed was based on a certain periodicity. So yes, this balancing act involves canonicity as opposed to, well, shall we say diversity or marginality, between little stories, the pity we see, and the grand narratives between classical literature and world literature. I should mention that I have taught both the Greco Roman track and an Africa, South Asia attempt at a kind of world lit track, a balancing act between historicist readings, where, upon first teaching this course, I really struggled to get past what I thought of as context, as opposed to ethical readings, what a certain kind of analysis that is possible for our students without having a great deal of depth and background.
Grant Parker:
So yes, a balancing act between the coherence of a supposed tradition, whether defined by a region or a language. And I might suggest in a Mediterranean context, a body of water or, and the infinite possibilities that come with comparison and connection as we become used to thinking of them. So I thought I can concretize these very broad thoughts with an example that connects a text that I taught from the African, South Asian track. And this is a text that comes from a Victorian-era linguist anthropologist, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town, interviewing and transcribing what they heard from some San people there used to be called a Bushman, and there's no university-accepted term for the San people. But a number of interviews were created, were done over a period of months with a small number, perhaps four or five recently released prisoners from the Cape Town prison. And before they returned to the desert, they were interviewed over a period of several months. They lived at the bottom of Wilhelm Bleek's garden in a Cape Town suburb of Mowbray.
Grant Parker:
This is a very poignant poem because the informant recalled a story told by his father about how, as a young man, he was supposed to take over the shamanistic knowledge of a religious specialist who had been wounded in ... a commando ray attack. And this knowledge was supposed to be passed on from the shaman to the father of the informant. My father's son, the string is broken. They have changed from what they were. Things have changed from what they were. The string was supposedly the knowledge of invoking a rain, the rainbow he's saying, my father's saying, I cannot hear the ringing now, I once used to hear a sound in the sky, he sang, I feel the string is gone for me. The song is gone for me. Things do not change sleeping. No sound comes calling in my sleep. I cannot hear a voice, the voice once with me, which would come calling through my dreams.
Grant Parker:
This is a very poignant poem because it not only reflects the guilt of someone who was supposed to be the bearer of a very, very ancient tradition, the guilt at being unable to do so amid the rapidly changing circumstances in the 19th century, Cape of Good Hope. And this is remembered by the son. Well, a further level of mediation took place when a poet, Stephen Watson turned these interviews into poems. In many cases, he changed very, very little of the translation. In other cases, he simplified, he made it, he aligned it more with his own poetic style. Nonetheless, this is the idea of a changed world and the role of language and of in its sacred frame to convey a certain kind of tradition. In the classical in Greco-Roman sequence. One of the texts that produced very rich conversation was that was Virgil's eclogues.
Grant Parker:
Now this is the beginning of pastoral tradition in the West in many different ways. And of course that is very specific historically specific, but I just wanted to quote here, the opening exchange between the two shepherds Meliboeus and Tityrus. So this is the around 40, before the common era, this is a time of a resettlement of demilitarized soldiers. And the loss of land are by Meliboeus. Tityrus lying there under the spreading beach tree cover. You study the wooden muse on slender shepherd's pipe. We are leaving the sweet fields and the frontiers of our country, we are fleeing our country, you Tityrus, idling in the shade, teach the woods to echo "lovely Amaryllis," Tityrus blacked out. You got reprieve, which my Meliboeus did not, O Meliboeus a god has created this leisure for us. Since he will always be a god for me, a gentle lamb for our fold, will often drench his alter.
Grant Parker:
Through him I cattle Rome, as you see. And I allow what I wish to be played by my rural reed. So this eclogue plus the ninth eclogue is all about the power or lack thereof of a song of speech to make a difference in a situation of crisis in facing precarity and loss. And so there is a superficial comparison to make here with a difference that the text on the right has been colonized in some quite extreme ways. Actually it has generated a very rich visual tradition and also other literary tradition in novels, for example. So that, is the kind of cross-cultural comparison. I'm not suggesting any resonance here, this kind of a comparison that generates questions about the resonance of any one text. So it is within this kind of comparison that we can think anew about the resonance over time and place of Vergil's text. In studying within the usual traditions of literary studies.
Grant Parker:
We simply assume the resonance of the Eclogues, but in fact, when the sound tradition is not written down and requires this considerable mediation, all of which adding its own complications, of course, then we think differently about that resonance. It seems to me that the resonance of text is a major factor to consider in all of this. Is it possible in light of to maintain a sense of epistemic humility? Is it that we need comparison to reframe and to remind interpreters of well-established traditions? That epistemic humility is a rich way to think about text, even if they are very, very familiar in certain kinds of traditions. I pose that a question because that seems to be far from obvious. ... As all of this - does comparison come at the expense of coherence. I mean, this is always the practical fear. Do we need to define coherence beyond some kind of historical overview?
Grant Parker:
When I first taught Greece and Rome, it seemed pretty easy. You know, start with Homer, then have [inaudible] ... And you have got something you can talk about, have some overview of the histories involved, but when you take a much bigger scope, it's much, there's no hope of any comparable historical overview, except some broad lines of on the scale of world history. For Africa and for South Asia, of course, that's very, very complex. And related the issues of space and place, how can they be an ordering device? I mean, Alexander's already disclosed that I have worked at an earlier period with colleagues in other areas of Mediterranean literatures, and we had a wonderful time putting together an anthology. Unfortunately, maybe we were ahead of our time, or, but I don't know, that's a self-flattering way of seeing it, but that anthology has really failed to connect. It has, it's drawn on a very wide range of text and approaches.
Grant Parker:
But yet, certainly for the people I know best, the classicists, it's very hard to convince the classicists of the need and the opportunity and the attraction of understanding the emplacement, the spatial elements of texts, or even of objects sometimes, that have a very particular geography. So the question is how do space and place work in all this? Perhaps we can do something with maps. Perhaps the Mediterranean has special problems and possibilities. Perhaps there is a pedagogy that can arise from this. I don't know. I think these are possibilities.
Grant Parker:
Fifth, even though I've certainly sought to escape Eurocentric frames in what I've done here, I'm not sure that I have succeeded actually, and I will concede that as a reason to keep reframing, keep finding new ways of seeing seemingly familiar things, and also perhaps to renew the need for comparison and connection, while recognizing that a great deal of the scholarly baggage, a great deal of the epistemology, comes from profoundly Eurocentric approaches. So I'm saying that Eurocentrism is a huge issue and not easily escaped, even with the addition of a map here and there.
Grant Parker:
And finally, I do wonder about the affinities our students have in this time of intense identity politics. I've certainly been interested, fascinated, in fact, to see what two of my colleagues in South Africa have done to add dimensions to the study of classical material. This is artistic, but perhaps mutatis mutandis, something could be done in literature as well. And so here is a student in South Africa who responded to this fresco from the Bay of Naples, from this particular villa, and put herself in that position and performed the gesture, the very striking gesture, and embodied the object of her study.
Grant Parker:
Classics especially is a very, very object-focused area of study. This is why I was very, very struck when I saw this image. And another student, from a different colleague, at a different university in South Africa, this was a design student rather than a classics student, used a similar kind of project to question the supposed perfection, the image of perfection that Greece and Rome have had for many hundreds of years of its students. So I will end with that note, that I would love to... with the idea that in the pedagogies involved, I'm very intrigued to see these experiments in allowing students to see themselves expressed in an often exclusionary kind of discourse. Thank you.
Alexander Key:
Brilliant. Thank you, Grant. And now I'll pass it back to Annette, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Annette, you have a good bit of space, considering you kept to the time, after our discussion.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Thank you so much. Grant, thank you also for this presentation. I was really struck by the question that you posed, does comparison come at the expense of coherence? And I'm really interested in hearing what others might... especially those of us working with Arabic as a research language and as a pedagogical language, how we might apply this question to Arabic studies, to the potential for building more globalized Arabic or Arabaphone studies trans-regionally. I was also delighted to note your pivoting, Grant, towards the Indian Ocean region and to connections across the territories on its peripheries, since I'd like to draw on an observation from my own experience in Indonesian studies. To begin, a few comments, which I hope will lead to a generative provocation, and to take this opportunity to shift and focus away from, or shift in direction slightly away from my opening remarks.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
As you, I'm sure, gathered, Indonesia is of course one of the sites which informed my comments, and this is a region where Arabophone and Sinophone influences, of course, and scripts, historically converged, and impacted the developments of Malay and Indonesian language and literature. And it's from this position that I note with envy, as someone who doesn't work on Sinophone and Sino-Malay texts, that Sino-Malay transcultural texts and histories enjoy a certain disciplinary sanctuary and sanction under the banner for Sinophone studies already.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And I think that unfortunately is much less true of trans-culturally Arabophone and Arabographic Malay texts and their afterlives, which coincide with historical and literary dynamics that remain disciplinary unhoused. And I know this is the case in Malay Southeast Asia, but it remains a parallel issue, effectively, in Senegal, in West Africa, former French West Africa. In both regions, scholars are rarely trained to engage with Arabic or Arabographic texts or histories in their afterlives, unless they're doing work in Islamic studies, and that leaves an array of literary and historical dynamics really unhoused.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And so, I know we're limited on time, but if I can just mention a couple of examples. The fact that post-independence debates about de-colonial returning the Indonesian language to the Arabic script in the 1950s, the fact that this raged in the national press is something that has been rarely studied, and its literary impact also rarely studied in Indonesian studies. Another little-known fact on parallels from Senegal is that the first vernacular language journal first establishing [inaudible] founded by the iconic Senegalese filmmaker [inaudible] in the 1970s also engaged with similar issues or problems weighing in on debates about the fraught triangulated relationship between colonial Latin influences, Arabic, and local vernaculars.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And few scholars were talking about the fact that even in its pages experimented with digraphia, with Arabic script and Latin scripts, and one of the founders even tried to invent a new script, as a matter of decolonizing national culture. All this to say that the current configuration of our disciplines of African literary studies, of Indonesian literary studies, of Arabic literary studies, which continues to really focus on a core of North African, West Asian native speech communities, tends to overlook these connections.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And so I'd perhaps like to kick off our Q&A, our broader Q&A, with really a speculative question, and I hope it's welcome, given the interdisciplinary nature of the series. What could a more decentralized, regionally decentralized field of Arabic and Arabophone studies, uncoupled from the conventional concerns of either Arabic studies or Islamic studies, learn from antecedent paradigm shifts that gave rise to Sinophone studies? Sinophone studies is a relatively polycentric, geographically decentralized field that allowed for greater explorations of intercultural, transcultural texts and Sinaitic script forms and post-Sinaitic literatures as well.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
What more could a more globalized field of Arabophone studies become in its greater attention to the politics of linguistic interference between Arabic and non-Arabic languages and non-standardized dialects? I mean, of course I don't work in Greek and Latin, but for those who do, and work in Arabic as well, I think it would be very interesting to hear what a more globalized Arabophone studies could learn from Greek and Latin studies, from the European classics, so to speak. And one of the reasons why I ask is that of course, high ritual or literary Arabic is perhaps similar to Mandarin Chinese, and its double status as both a colonially subaltern medium and historically prestigious one. I mean, to allude also to Alexander's opening remarks.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
I think my impression is that, as Alexander noted, scholars of trans-regional Arabic at times struggle to find an adequate framework or the conceptual language through which to address that duality or that simultaneity of Arabic's historical prestige and colonial or post-colonial subalternity. But these are problems that scholars in parallel fields like Sinophone Studies have also grappled with, from my understanding, of course, outside of that. How might we learn from that parallel field in order to excavate or explore these intersecting hierarchies, the precolonial and post-colonial, or relative to both European colonial hierarchies, pre-colonial imperial hierarchies and post-colonial ethno-nationalist ones? So, I'll leave it at that, and would love to hear from others who might have ideas on how we might hasten our shift and broaden our horizons in this regard.
Alexander Key:
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Annette. Grant, do you want to ask maybe the first question or...
Grant Parker:
Okay. Thank you. Well, those are wonderfully provocative questions, Annette. I wish I could match them. But I do wonder, what does it mean to map a language? We live in a world of maps, yet it sounds very hard to know what it is that a map represents, so used are we to them. People imagine that they help us get from A to B, but most of the time they show us where we are in the world in some kind of existential sense. Because I think that will be one way to tackle some of the questions raised. A map of Latin becomes very widespread with the Jesuits, and yet, the department that I'm in here, we have 20 faculty and none of them does anything with the Jesuit Latin.
Grant Parker:
So that worries me, actually, just like the Ortelius map of the Indian Ocean worries me, because that really punches the coherence of our disciplines, even at the same time as the question of coherence is itself up for grabs. Okay. Just let me start with that. I was also thinking what would happen if... To what degree have scholars actually already compared the cultural politics of Latin, Greek, Arabic? And even those, all of those have a strong presence in the Mediterranean, even if they have a different relation to the Mediterranean. Okay. Let me stop there, so we can hear from others.
Alexander Key:
Great. Annette, do you want to take on any of that and then we'll open it up to everyone else?
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
My initial response there would be, I think pedagogically it would be interesting to certainly have students compare different ways of mapping a language. I mean, in my own scholarship, in my first book project, I've actually juxtaposed a couple of chapters on the way in which orientalist scholars write on this, beginning with [inaudible] in particular, though, of course he has antecedents, juxtapose inter-imperial mappings of the language in early European philological scholarship with another chapter in which a number of 19th century [inaudible] writers, so intellectuals and scholars associated with the rise of 19th-century Arabic print and translational movements, were writing about similar, or projecting similar globalized visions of Arabic Islamic contact zones, starting with [inaudible] travelog to Paris, for example.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
I think one could translate an exercise like that in pedagogical terms into the classroom. I don't know how one would extend that across time historically, backdating this to the contexts and texts that you allude to, Grant, but certainly your opening slides reminded me of the "The Lusiads," which I've taught in the past, in a course on comparative literatures of the Indian Ocean, which I've paired with a text like "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad, along with [inaudible] work, the Indonesian author.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And even though [inaudible]'s probably most relevant text on the subject of Portuguese incursions to the Moluccas has never been translated out of Indonesia and into English, if ever it were, [inaudible], which means, "the current reverses," I think it would've paired well with a text like "The Lusiads," because it offers an inverse perspective on the first colonial incursions of the Portuguese into the archipelagic Southeast Asia.
Alexander Key:
Brilliant. Okay. Any questions? Nasrin, go ahead.
Nasrin Rahimieh:
Yes. Actually, if I could come back to this question of the [inaudible], I really found... First of all, thank you for... Both of your comments were just superb. I work in Persian, and I was going to comment on how much we are separated in Persian from Arabic even. So quite frequently we have to rely on translations, English translations. And it's ignorance, lack of learning, despite some education in Arabic in growing up in Iran, it's not really a language that is in use, even in the Islamic Republic. So really it's those barriers which didn't exist, necessarily. It seems to me that as you were talking about the pairings, and were a translation available, we could use them pedagogically for other pairings, I'm reminded of this dilemma that I constantly face, which is, I'm going to have to look for translations of things in order to make them accessible, not just to students, but sometimes to myself.
Nasrin Rahimieh:
So it reminds me, this is not so much a question and comment, is that that colonial legacy is really powerful and has had an impact in the formations of our disciplines, even not just in North America, but say in Iran, in other places. How do we study Arabic in... Is there a Department of Arabic Literature in Iran? No. So, it's fascinating. Your comments really made me think about mapping of languages. For instance, if we look at Persian and Ottoman Turkish, or Persian and Arabic, all of a sudden, there are so many more affinities and criss-crossings that seem to vanish when we enter the 19th and 20th centuries, at least in my limited knowledge.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Yeah. I have a response to that also, if I may. Thank you so much for the comment. I think one of the terms that I mentioned in the course of my comments, [inaudible] course, is I think one that could perhaps be more strongly illuminated, not only across its multiple valences transdisciplinarily, but also pedagogically, given that historically of course it first referentially designated non-Arab Persians and non-Arab Persian languages, but then since, of course, became a term that capaciously referred to non-Arabs just categorically, not unlike the [inaudible] in the Greek context.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And I think that that shift, that historical shift from the classical period into the contemporary period, is one that's worth excavating, and one worth excavating across a number of trans-historical literary texts, because the term reappears in the 19th century and these have been parodied in some of the texts I alluded to. Well, actually not a text I alluded to. [inaudible] I don't know, Alexander, if you... I'm sure you are familiar with [inaudible], the 19th-century Lebanese scholar. So there are ways in which a concept like that is also politicized in 19th- and 20th-century context that could allow us to make generative connections to a classical period in context.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
In another respect, I feel that [inaudible], the socio linguist, [inaudible]'s work is one that I'd like to teach, because he illuminates this conceptually very well, I think unlike anyone else really, along with maybe Michael Cooperson's articles on these ethnonyms and ethnonymic differences. I think I don't want to monopolize the comments in Q&A, but a text like [inaudible] by [inaudible] when we're looking to teach a relatively contemporary 20th-century text, where [inaudible] Persian poems are interwoven in the text, and were intended to be untranslated and remain untranslated in both the original Arabic and the English translation, might offer an opportunity in the classroom to think about those changes and those shifts.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Because [inaudible] talked about this in interviews, how the [inaudible] features in the text, and one can offer, I think some really interesting interpretations about those connections and the alienation between Arabic and Persian as experimented with in the [inaudible] 20th century, through an experimental novel like that [inaudible] incidentally thought was his most accomplished, even though it's critically underappreciated.
Nasrin Rahimieh:
Thank you.
Alexander Key:
Okay. Oh, yeah. Vered.
Vered Shemtov:
Just want to thank you both. It was really, really fascinating, and it was interesting for me to see, so what was missing from our conversation here of coherence? We're talking about language. We're talking about text. We're talking about place. And I think that's very interesting, that we didn't talk here about authors. And this history of authors, I think, led us to a certain...
Vered Shemtov:
...direction that the thinking about how we are talking about presenting a picture, not through a lifetime, not through... The text is so much open to so many things. It takes us immediately to other texts. Language, we need to travel with it. And I just find it to be the first, maybe the first step for change.
Vered Shemtov:
And then when you think about place for such a long time, we thought about place as related to language, as related to authors, rather than actually seeing who comes into the place and who goes out of the place, and then staying with the place. So I think everything kind of opens up when we get away from the author, which was not here in the conversation. And so thank you for that.
Vered Shemtov:
And then the second thing is I really liked what the [inaudible] showed us at the end. And as we make all these movements, how can we see ourselves in them? And how can we then go back and see how others saw themselves in other text? Because it's not something that only we are doing now. And so, I loved it as just as an expanding our thinking on how to teach.
Vered Shemtov:
And finally, just the needing of a crowd. I think that it's not just the comparisons, it's their collaborations. And most of it, just as you said, you need the Persian and the Arabic for me to teach Hebrew literature, a language that went through Italy, went through Spain, went through Iraq, tons of places, Yemen. It's one thing to teach it alone. It's another thing to teach it with the people that work on literatures from these areas. It becomes a completely different story. So I just add collaboration to making it even less coherent, but more real.
Alexander Key:
Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm gonna abuse my coordinating position to ask a question. I would really like one question I was going to ask Annette, that Annette then brought up in her responses, was about the extent to which these comparative spheres are empires and we are dealing with the Arabic. And exactly that point, the Sinophone is both imperial and [inaudible] is I think a really important, and I think that tells a about... I think that's great to Annette's question how we are going to think about the future global Arabophone sphere because... I mean, I think that the block is the late post-colonial insecurity about the very status of Arabic as a legitimate language or sphere of expertise or a place, and that's so connected to contemporary politics in the United States of America and contemporary politics in Europe.
Alexander Key:
I remember Nasrin talking in a previous one about how you can't teach Persian in California without engaging with California and Iranians diaspora politics. So there's just something, there's just so much pressure against the... And that pressure creates a sort of fetishization of the core. I think that works against the more accurate expansion into an arabophone reality, that comes out in your research.
Alexander Key:
And I guess, and I wanted to put this together with what Grant was saying about epistemic humility. And I guess my question will be, what does it mean in Anglophone institutions to engage with a question of the Arabophone world. And to have epistemic humility towards something that was an empire, because there's so many directions. There's an epistemic humility towards the past, and then there's an attitude towards an empire that's then going to be flavored by the same symbols and dialect that the empire is now finds itself in. And I just wondered how both of you Grant and Annette would think about that.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
If I may venture a response, the great question, Alexander, and I think that Arabic in what I hope could be a more decentralized future Arabophone Studies. As with Chinese and Sinophone studies historically is implicated, must be implicated in Imperial histories, but are not reducible to them. I know this is of course, clearly the case given Arabic's role in transcontinental American [inaudible] histories to say nothing of its non-coercive role, as a ritual language. So [inaudible] histories surely is a part of what needs to be a paradigmatic shift, but it's not the only. The only way of scaffolding this future horizon, of what I hope will be a filled building on possibly antecedent model.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And building also on the kinds of work that scholars and sociolinguistics like [inaudible], who wrote a wonderful monograph on Muslims beyond the Arab world or [inaudible] Richie and South and Southeast Asian studies have written about the possibilities of investigating Arabic and translational and trans-regional contexts beyond nominal Middle East. But of course I think that dual position of Arabic needs still to be contended with. And I think this was implied. I hope in my opening anecdote citing a Dutch merchant on Arabic's role as a translational trade language.
Alexander Key:
Grant, and then, there's another question.
Grant Parker:
Just a quick remark that the role of Greek and Latin are very different because they so closely aligned with European imperialism. That's a problem. It's a problem for our students. It tends to make graduate students profoundly full of self doubt. And angst actually, and we saw this very, very viscerally. So yes, it's only very, very recently that scholars have begun to point out the support and potential of classics. There's a book in classics in class that came out just a few years ago in, based on the U.K. and the surprises that it's taken so long, so many thousands of books on the history of classics for ... to write such a book in English. So from that point of view, if my professional basis is in classics, I actually need, I have a greater need to argue for a... Of the wording of language and literature of the multi-vocality and discrepant perspective. There's actually a political need to do so in order to, if one of the things I want to do is reinvigorate the scholarly habitus from which I've emerged.
Alexander Key:
Okay, a question from John. Yeah.
John Michael Colón:
Yeah. Thank you for the really excellent presentations. I had one question for Annette and one question for Grant, although both of you feel free to comment on either. So for Annette, I loved the overview of the kind of evolving role internationally of Arabic in different cultures. And I'm afraid it's a very unexciting and vulgar question because as somebody who's not a specialist in the international role of Arabic over hundreds of years, I was kind of trying to keep up with the history while also tying it back to the main idea.
John Michael Colón:
So very simple question. When you say that when you take a comparative approach between the international role of Latin and the international role of Arabic, if you had to boil it down to bullet points, like what are the similarities and what are the differences and maybe also throwing in something like the international role of Chinese, because when you were talking about the scripts and how many languages first got their scripts via Arabic, immediately what it kind of came to mind for me, I know a little bit more about the history of the Sinosphere and it's like the international role that literally because Chinese, you can understand it, based just on the script, the characters, and ... even if the underlying language is actually different languages.
John Michael Colón:
And it was used like internationally for diplomacy, because everybody knew how to read Chinese characters in like Japan, Korea and mainland China in certain region in certain periods. So they could literally just communicate without actually speaking each other's spoken languages. So I was wondering, if you take Latin, you take Arabic and you take Chinese in the sorts of periods that I'm talking about, what are specific similarities and differences that we might be able to point out. So that was my question for Annette.
John Michael Colón:
Question for Grant is, in the interest of what we were discussing about like, how we can get kind of beyond the narrowly Eurocentric paradigm and teaching large swaths of literary history. I thought that the poem, the song Clement by the poet, and I confess, I don't know how to pronounce the name, but Zatin, was really moving, but I couldn't help but read it as kind of not just about the death of the mentor figure, but also about the death of this continual oral tradition. And maybe that's too much of a reading, but the period late-19th century kind of seems to kind of bring up this idea in my head about the death of oral cultures through forcibly imposed literary culture of the colonizers, so on and so forth.
John Michael Colón:
I was wondering if you had anything... And it's notable that the translation was from a collection of poems by the translator. And it's kind of under the translator's name rather than not necessarily under the original oral poet's name. So I wonder what you think of proposals by people like Ngugi wa Thiongo to kind of provide a place in contemporary literary studies for oral traditions that have been displaced by agrarian imperialist societies and their literary cultures through like oral literature, or creating through performance art or through the... Actually don't know what it would be called, transcription of the oral literatures into book form and stuff like that. And having that be part of our international world literature canon. I was wondering what you thought of proposals like that, or maybe other proposals that might actually kind of expand our range of literary inquiry, somewhat.
Alexander Key:
Grant, Annette. Who wants to go first in answering?
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Grant, do you want to go first?
Grant Parker:
Okay. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, John Michael. Yes, absolutely. Your reading of that poem is exactly what I had in mind that this was not just one person's dilemma, but it captured the entire extinction. We would know almost nothing about the San people, if it hadn't been for this archive, which was only survived by chance, because at one point everything got moved around and so on, and person ran. The sole survivor ran out of money. It's a complete miracle that we have even that, but yes, it is a problem. How are the literary fruits get publicized, get circulated, get known. And that is an issue which became very disputed.
Grant Parker:
Not unsurprisingly in South Africa, but the point that you made in relation to Ngugi is a very important one, namely, that the very notion of literature in a place like South Africa needs to be expanded to encompass the tens of thousands of years, that are implicit in traditions related to the San people, even if they've survived only on a very, very tenuous and a very limited and a very heavily framed way. [Inaudible], whatever you want to call it, the importance of performance is enormous.
Grant Parker:
I might mention one of the projects I've been involved with -- it's been to translate some of Virgil's eclogues into one of the vernacular languages of South Africa. And it's a very particularly chosen one because one of the main authors, one of the early non-English authors of South African literature called Solomon Plaatje was a native speaker of Setswana, the language of Botswana. And he wrote to treaters that addressed the same issue of the first eclogue, namely Dispossession of the Land. And so I'm working with colleagues just this week to identify the native speaker of Setswana who can provide a rendition of Virgil's poem that will go into a multilingual anthology that includes English, but also the other languages of South Africa on that very basis. So to operationalize the question, the issue of translation in such a way as to promote breadth of understanding of social inclusion actually, and to create, to create something different to reinterpret Virgil's poem, very radically from the desert in Southern Africa. So I'm with you. Thank you.
Alexander Key:
Great, Annette.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Yeah. John, thank you for your question. I mean, it's a question that really, or set of questions that really demand a vast answer that I don't really have the time to offer. So let me hazard a more circumscribed response with reference to Benedict Anderson, the author of "Imagined Communities" who of course was an Indonesian before he was ever a theorist of comparative nationalisms. Anderson in shorthands had argued, of course, in that text that Arabic in effect followed the fate of Latin in its displacement by rising nationalized print vernaculars, which is of course a clear oversimplification for which one can find plenty of counter evidence. And so my work in part seeks to challenge that early thesis with reference to an Indonesian case and situates the Indonesian case comparatively. And finding evidence of my own in literary texts, but also building on the work of Islamic study scholars like Michael [inaudible] at Princeton, who made the same challenge to Anderson's thesis in his work, "The [inaudible] the Winds."
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
So one can look at these paradigms as very distinct and in literary terms, think about the coexistence of Arabic as a historically ritual language is retaining at least a symbolic force. The script itself also retaining a symbolic force. If not retaining its adoption as a mass medium of print in post-colonial context, like Indonesia and like Senegal. And it's on these grounds that perhaps one can engage in broad comparative work in across regions and sites where Arabic had a scriptural presence. It may be a manuscript form, but also retains a ritual presence and a politicized, one of that.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
And I'm afraid that I hope you'll excuse me for not saying more about the Chinese and Sinotic kind of comparison. Of course, not being a scholar of Chinese, I can't... But my comments earlier really had to do with observations grounded in a nation context where Sinophone writers and people who were writers who were using both Sinotic writing systems and, or experimenting with Latinate print, as well. There's again, a disciplinary sanctuary for examining those transcultural texts where you don't have the same space disciplinarily right now for an Arabophone counterpart.
John Michael Colón:
Thank you so much.
Alexander Key:
Okay. Thank you. Okay. Thank you everybody. It's better to end at 90 minutes and leave people wishing the conversation would go on. I certainly do, than to do the opposite. Yeah. It gives me the work of both Grant and Annette gives me great optimism for the future where often that seems hard to get, but it's very exciting. Thank you both ever so much for coming. Thank you to everybody else who came. It's been great fun, talking to you over the year and yeah, we're going to be putting this stuff up on the website with transcripts and some blogs and Kiara's working on this. So you'll hear some more about the documentation process. Thank you ever so much. And I look forward to our next meeting.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Thank you so much, Alexander.
Alexander Key:
Thank you.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Thank you so much for joining and to Grant for joining.
Alexander Key:
Thank you everyone.
Annette Damayanti Lienau:
Take good care. Bye.
Grant Parker:
Thanks.