The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU), presents the second session of its Fall 2025 Seminar Series, “Gendered Scripts and Legacies in the Sahelian Space: Pre-Islamic, Islamic, and European Languages.” The lecture will be delivered by Ousseina D. Alidou, Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA, and moderated by Maha Bashri, Associate Professor of Media and Communication at The Africa Institute, GSU.
This event is part of the From Area Studies to Global Studies seminar series, a core course within the Ph.D. in Global Studies curriculum. The series brings together distinguished scholars specializing in the studies of Africa, Asia, and their diasporas, whose work engages with key questions shaping the field of Global Studies.
Join us on Thursday, October 23, 2025, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM (follow the link to join online via Zoom).
The session is free and open to the public.
The cultural space of the West African Sahel is a crossroads of several gendered epistemologies shaped by different scripts and their overlap with orality. Three of these scripts, which will be the focus of the lecture, are Tifinagh, Ajami, and the Roman/Latin alphabet. Tifinagh has been in existence since antiquity and is used predominantly among the Amazigh/Tuareg populations; Ajami, the Africanized Arabic script, is a product of encounters with Islam that stretches back to the tenth century; and the Roman alphabet, introduced during European colonial rule, represents the more recent nineteenth-century European legacy in West Africa.
Professor Alidou will examine the interplay between these three scriptural traditions in terms of their evolution and the gender and class politics that have shaped different literacies and literary traditions in what is today the Republic of Niger. She will also highlight how recent postcolonial forces of democratization have led to a rethinking of the role of Tifinagh and Ajami, particularly in addressing social hierarchies in knowledge production and access resulting from the dominant position of the French language within the Francophone polity.
This effort to democratize the use of Ajami beyond the religious sphere, by further desacralizing it and freeing it from the clerical monopoly in Hausa-speaking societies, offers an insightful perspective into the divergent subjectivity of the inheritors of a common cultural heritage spread across former French and British colonies that now comprise the contemporary Niger Republic and Nigeria.
Ousseina D. Alidou is a Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Theoretical Linguistics, Gender, and Cultural Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, USA. She was recently named the Library of Congress Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South (2025) and serves on the Advisory Board of The Africa Institute.
She has been awarded the 2025 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize of the African Studies Association for her latest work, Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Read more.
Maha Bashri is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU). Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU), presents the second session of its Fall 2025 Seminar Series, “Gendered Scripts and Legacies in the Sahelian Space: Pre-Islamic, Islamic, and European Languages.” The lecture will be delivered by Ousseina D. Alidou, Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA, and moderated by Maha Bashri, Associate Professor of Media and Communication at The Africa Institute, GSU.
The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU), presents the second session of its Fall 2025 Seminar Series, “Gendered Scripts and Legacies in the Sahelian Space: Pre-Islamic, Islamic, and European Languages.” The lecture will be delivered by Ousseina D. Alidou, Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA, and moderated by Maha Bashri, Associate Professor of Media and Communication at The Africa Institute, GSU.
This event is part of the From Area Studies to Global Studies seminar series, a core course within the Ph.D. in Global Studies curriculum. The series brings together distinguished scholars specializing in the studies of Africa, Asia, and their diasporas, whose work engages with key questions shaping the field of Global Studies.
Join us on Thursday, October 23, 2025, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM (follow the link to join online via Zoom).
The session is free and open to the public.
The cultural space of the West African Sahel is a crossroads of several gendered epistemologies shaped by different scripts and their overlap with orality. Three of these scripts, which will be the focus of the lecture, are Tifinagh, Ajami, and the Roman/Latin alphabet. Tifinagh has been in existence since antiquity and is used predominantly among the Amazigh/Tuareg populations; Ajami, the Africanized Arabic script, is a product of encounters with Islam that stretches back to the tenth century; and the Roman alphabet, introduced during European colonial rule, represents the more recent nineteenth-century European legacy in West Africa.
Professor Alidou will examine the interplay between these three scriptural traditions in terms of their evolution and the gender and class politics that have shaped different literacies and literary traditions in what is today the Republic of Niger. She will also highlight how recent postcolonial forces of democratization have led to a rethinking of the role of Tifinagh and Ajami, particularly in addressing social hierarchies in knowledge production and access resulting from the dominant position of the French language within the Francophone polity.
This effort to democratize the use of Ajami beyond the religious sphere, by further desacralizing it and freeing it from the clerical monopoly in Hausa-speaking societies, offers an insightful perspective into the divergent subjectivity of the inheritors of a common cultural heritage spread across former French and British colonies that now comprise the contemporary Niger Republic and Nigeria.
Ousseina D. Alidou is a Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Theoretical Linguistics, Gender, and Cultural Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, USA. She was recently named the Library of Congress Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South (2025) and serves on the Advisory Board of The Africa Institute.
She has been awarded the 2025 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize of the African Studies Association for her latest work, Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Read more.
Maha Bashri is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU). Read more.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
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