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Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

Aria Fani  and
Kevin L. Schwartz Open the ORCID record for Kevin L. Schwartz [Opens in a new window]
Aria Fani
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Kevin L. Schwartz*
Affiliation:
Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
*
Email: [email protected]
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Extract

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.

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Iranian Studies , Volume 55 , Special Issue 3: Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century , July 2022 , pp. 605 - 609
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Cameron Cross who carefully shepherded this cluster through the peer review process and significantly strengthened it through his own editorial insights. We thank Sussan Siavoshi for her support and intellectual engagement from start to finish. We appreciate Assef Ashraf's editorial assistance with the book reviews. Last but not least, our deep gratitude goes to all the blind reviewers of Iranian Studies and our interlocutors: Ali Gheissari, Samuel Hodgkin, Alexander Jabbari, and James Pickett.

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