Literary Modernity in the Persophone Realm: A Reader

Abstracta iranica, 2021

The volume considers the relation between modernity and tradition in Persian literature as one of continuity, rather than as a break. “Assuming the logic of alternative modernities, this volume prioritises the particularity of Iranian modernity” (4). “Covering literary experiments from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries” (i), it places “the introduction of European works” “alongside a whole series of other determinants that shaped the modern literary imaginary” (5). It consists of an introductory chapter, followed by seven chapters and an index. https://doi.org/10.4000/abstractairanica.54344

This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scholarly exchange between Iranians and Indians reworking their shared Persianate literary heritage, considering literary history as an important and perhaps overlooked site for the production of literary modernity. Arguing for a verbal as well as textual discourse of modernity shared between early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian intellectuals, Jabbari examines how these intellectuals made use of premodern materials for their modernizing projects, and how nationalism shaped this process. Four aspects of modern literary history writing receive particular focus here: engagement with the tazkirah tradition, inclusion of extraliterary national figures alongside poets, use of a shared set of references and sources, and new sexual aesthetics that break with the homoerotic Persianate past.

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2022

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2020

Review of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, eds., Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 2019) for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 83:2 (June 2020)

Abstracta Iranica, 2022

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions, censorship, and the “Neither Western nor Eastern” motto following the 1979 Revolution. Therefore, it might seem that Persian literature of Iran today has no claim of “worldliness”. However, the fact that post-revolutionary Iran is the focus of several chapters in this volume challenges such presuppositions about contemporary Iranian literature. The fact that it belongs to the Literature as World Literature Series is a testimony to the bringing of Persian literature into dialogue with other World Literatures represented in this series.

Iranian Studies, 2022

Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.

Iranian Studies

Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The inte...

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2024

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Daniel Majchrowicz

Invisible Religion and Paradoxes of Monotheism: Henry Corbin on Iranian Islam, 2024