Clay Lamar

Fellowship: Rocca Pre-Dissertation
Fellowship Year: 2025
Project Theme/Title: Language and the Nation: France, Language, and the Great Desert in the 18th Century

Abstract: Over the past ten or so years I have studied West African and Saharan Arabic in immersion, first serving in Morocco with the Peace Corps and in the most recent years before Berkeley, studying Arabic grammar in Mauritania. In the past two years here in my work with Professor Bruce Hall as a historian of Africa my interests have been directed more and more to questions related to the history of languages and what would be entailed in a history of pedagogy in French West Africa. This question reflects on my part a concerted effort to push colonial history within and beyond paradigms of empire through linguistic specificity. That is, if one were to take Arabic linguistic practices and European National linguistic practices from the 18th century forward fully—taking them without either the assured scientificity of a linguistic field, we are pushed up against questions of that fields presumed limits and towards questions of subject formation and educational institutions.