African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures
AMESALL End of Year Celebration
The Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures is pleased to invite you to its End of Year Celebration.
Thursday April 16, 5PM-6:30PM
Academic Building (West Wing, 6th floor), Room 6010
College Avenue Campus, Rutgers University
Meet our amazing faculty, discover exciting opportunities for study abroad, get a taste of our regional cuisines and a chance to socialize with the students who make AMESALL a dynamic and diverse crossroads for Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia right here in New Jersey!
Sponsor: Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures | Rutgers-NB
Join us for a screening of Wadjda (2012), the groundbreaking first feature film by a female Saudi Arabian director, Haifaa al-Mansour. This inspiring story explores themes of gender, culture, and ambition through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl in Riyadh.
Free and open to the Rutgers community.
Title: Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848–1940
Book Talk by Kelly Duke-Bryant,
Associate Professor and Chair of History,
Rowan University
April 13, 2026, 2-3:20pm, AB 4052
Book abstract:
Negotiating Childhood explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Kelly M. Duke Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent. This deeply researched work uses a wide range of sources to examine children’s experiences in spaces where they encountered French discipline and surveillance, such as wardship courts, public streets, schools, juvenile reformatories, and vaccine clinics. The book shows not only how these spaces re-ordered African childhood, but also how children themselves shaped and limited French efforts to impose order, especially when the state depended on African children’s cooperation to make good on rhetoric about child “protection.” It also charts the rise of documentation in children’s lives, as colonial representatives recorded names, ages, and other details about the African children with whom they interacted. Tracing the “documented” child back to the early colonial period, Negotiating Childhood historicizes the emergence of identity documentation—so crucial to our contemporary world—and questions the naturalness of the very idea of the “child.”
Speaker bio:
Kelly Duke Bryant is associate professor and chair of History at Rowan University. She is a specialist of modern African history, focusing on childhood, youth, family, education, and politics in nineteenth and twentieth century Senegal. She is the author of Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2026) and Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). She has published several book chapters and research articles which have appeared in the Journal of African History, French Colonial History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, the Journal of Family History, and others. She won the 2019 Fass-Sandin Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Children and Youth for the best article published that year.
Book Talk with Ricardo René Larémont, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology at SUNY Binghamton and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Center for African Studies, Howard University
This lecture is about marriage, romantic passion, and domesticity in African popular music using the case of these artists.
This documentary captivatingly tells the story of how women in Fuji music assertively and artfully navigated the complex layers of cultural expectations, patriarchy, love, romance, marriage, motherhood, and intergenerational and gender dynamics to become trailblazers and musical icons in a music genre dominated by men.
Lecture by Dr. Suad Musa, Gender Center for Peacebuilding, Justice, and Sustainable Development
AMESALL INVITES YOU TOShare our similarities, celebrate our differences With African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Culture and Food Festivity.WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4TH, 2026IFTAR AT RUTGERS ACADEMIC BUILDING(WEST WING)ROOM 6010 | 5:30-7:00pm
Mozambique’s Bilingual Education: A Regressive Shift in Policy
Lecture by Sarita Monjane Henriksen,
Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence,
Rutgers University, Newark
March 04, 2026, 2-3:20pm, Frelinghuysen Hall B6
Talk abstract:
Mozambique is characterised by societal multilingualism and high levels of linguistic diversity, while bilingualism is primarily experienced at the individual level through the use of Mozambican Bantu languages alongside Portuguese. Despite this reality, official Portuguese monolingualism has historically been promoted, particularly in education. In the post-independence period, Portuguese was established as the sole medium of instruction, reflecting an assimilationist ideology aimed at fostering national unity, yet simultaneously marginalising and silencing linguistic diversity. The later introduction of mother tongue-based bilingual education represented a significant political and pedagogical achievement, acknowledging the role of Mozambican Bantu languages in learning, inclusion, and epistemic justice, despite persistent challenges related to implementation, resources, and teacher training. However, a recent ministerial Instruction (December 2025) concerning the organisation of bilingual education signals a regressive turn. Rather than consolidating earlier gains, the decision reframes bilingual education in ways that weaken its transformative potential and risk reinstating monolingual norms under the guise of reform. This talk critically examines the Ministerial Instruction as a policy retreat, situating it within broader debates on language, power, and educational equity in multilingual Mozambique.
Sarita Monjane Henriksen is a Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, for the academic year 2025–2026. She holds a Postdoctoral qualification in Linguistic Human Rights in Education from the University of Salamanca, Spain; a PhD in Language Education Planning and Policy from Roskilde University, Denmark; an MA in Linguistics in Education from the University of Surrey - St Mary’s University College, United Kingdom; and a BA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from Universidade Pedagógica (UP-Maputo), Mozambique. She is currently an Associate Professor in Language Education. She teaches a wide range of subjects, including Sociolinguistics, Language and Cultural Diversity, Language, Culture and Power, Translation Studies, and Introduction to Consecutive Interpreting. Dr Henriksen serves as Director of Cooperation and International Relations at UP-Maputo. Her international academic experience includes appointments as a DAAD Visiting Professor at Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany (2022–2023); Guest Professor at ISCTE-IUL, Portugal (2021–2023); and at the Universidade Federal do Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil, and the University of Southern Denmark. She previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Language Sciences, Communication and Arts at UP-Maputo (2012–2017). Her recent publications include "Mozambican Languages in the Public Sphere: An Opportunity to Be Seized" (AVM Verlag, 2026); "English in Mozambique" in The WileyBlackwell Encyclopaedia of World Englishes (2025); and Language Education in Mozambique: Subsidies for a Language Policy Oriented Towards Global Citizenship" (Gala-Gala Editoress, 2023).
Co-hosted by the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Literatures and Languages; Center for African Studies; and Rutgers Global
Global Africa and the Humanities Lecture and Film Series, an initiative of the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures
Co-conveners: Ousseina Alidou and Thato Magano
A roundtable discussion on the role of language in global modernisms on the occasion of the publication of “The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia,” a special issue of Modernism/modernity co-edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow
A DOCUMENTARY FILM ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND THE PLANET TODAY
Ahona Panda is a historian of South Asia and Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College. In 2025-2026, she is a Visiting Scholar of South Asian History at Cornell University.
The Linguistics Research Institute presents:
Mandaean Language and Culture:
An Analysis of Iranian Roots and a Review of New Research
“The satirical novel [Hot Maroc], deftly translated by Alexander E. Elinson, is unmistakably Moroccan, but deals with universal issues: political corruption, blowhards and know-it-alls, and internet anonymity.” – Asymptote
JOIN US IN CELEBRATING OUR STUDENTS AND FACULTY AS WE BEGIN THIS ACADEMIC YEAR. LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR PROGRAMS, MAKE FRIENDS, AND ENJOY SOME SNACKS
A TALK BYProf. Sangita Gopal, Associate Professor of English, Cinema Studies Program, Comparative Literature University of Oregon
JOIN US IN CELEBRATING OUR STUDENTS AND FACULTY AS WE APPROACH THE END OF THE ACADEMIC YEAR. LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR PROGRAMS, MAKE NEW FRIENDS AND SAMPLE SOME TASTY REGIONAL CUISINE.
A day-long event for K-12 educators, Rutgers students and faculty, artists, and community leaders to learn strategies for promoting the educational values of orality, storytelling, multilingualism, and community engagement through a Global Hip Hop framework, along with perspectives on youth movements and practices throughout the world.
