An annotated bibliography of essays from the Theories and Methodologies section of the March 2024 issue of PMLA, published by Cambridge University Press here.

The term Persianate was coined in the late 1960s by the historian Marshall Hodgson. He used it to conceptualize the region from the Balkans to Bengal, which between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a particular form of political and literary flourishing afforded by the unprecedented material power of Islam and the aesthetic contributions of court cultures in the Ottoman, Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal empires of West, Central, and South Asia. The Persianate world, as it has come to be called, was transregional and pluralistic in myriad ways, but it is typically considered to have been unified at least in part by Persian literary culture, Persian social form and public decorum (adab), and most specifically the Persian language.

Despite the archivally rigorous, theoretically and disciplinarily expansive kind of scholarship being done with the Persianate as its conceptual rationale, this globally vast field of study has yet to be pulled into the spotlight of literary studies. Thus, the primary aim of this Theories and Methodologies special feature is to showcase this work to the discipline of language and literature writ large. The essayists gathered here examine the aesthetic, cultural, linguistic, political, religious, economic, and social currents that both construct what has come to be called the Persianate world and compromise it at key moments not just in history but also in certain analytic contexts. In the process, they show the directions the field has taken most recently, which challenge some of the originary premises of the Persianate concerning language, ethnicity, periodization, and aesthetic form. Most ambitiously, the essays demonstrate how the concept of the Persianate offers pathways toward addressing various methodological problems that still beset literary studies.

Adapted from Pardis Dabashi,
“Persianate Words and Worlds: Introduction to ‘The Persianate’,”
PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 193–199.

Akbari Shahmirzadi, Atefeh. “From Daneshvar to Damahi: New Formulations of the Persianate.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 351–359.

Akbari Shahmirzadi shows that crucial acts of interlingual encounter and exchange form one of the key ways in which the early modern Persianate framework extended into Iranian cultural production from the mid twentieth to the early twenty-first century. She analyzes how three Iranian works—Simin Daneshvar’s novel Savushun (1969), Bahram Beizaei’s film Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986), and Damahi’s music album Dar Man Boro Shekar (2019)—were created in response to watershed moments of crisis in the development of Iran as a modern nation-state. She argues that these works connect the framework of the Persianate and Persian modernity by weaving together multiple literary, linguistic, and musical traditions. These pluralistic works, which are inter- and intralingual and translational, thus push against national and linguistic borders both real and imagined.

Ambler, Catherine. “Persianate Unfamiliarity: A Qaṣīda by Shawkat Bukhārī to Imam al-Rizā.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 329–337.

Modern scholarship employs the concept of the Persianate to designate a transregional ecumene, sphere, or world, as well as the processes that shaped and sustained this ecumene. To be (or become) Persianate was to belong and partake in the Persianate ecumene through forms of affiliation, identification, and exchange, which could include language, literatures, politics, networks, institutions, and norms. Thus, the poetics of unfamiliarity might appear to be separate from or opposed to the forms of belonging and exchange that characterized the Persianate ecumene. Ambler argues instead that the poetics of unfamiliarity is an integrally Persianate phenomenon. She focuses on a qaṣīda (“ode”) by the Persian poet Muhammad Ishāq Shawkat Bukhārī (d. 1695/6) in which Shawkat describes both himself and his poetics in terms of their unfamiliarity. She posits that there is a dialectical interplay between familiarity and unfamiliarity in the qaṣīda, since participating in the Persianate poetic tradition is what enables Shawkat’s poetics to find fresh and imaginative distance from that tradition.

Brophy, David. “The Aristocracy of Qing Xinjiang as Patrons of Islamic Letters.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 321–328.

This article considers the relationship between modern Uighur literature and the wider “Persianate” sphere. The genres, themes, and “literary sensibility” of Persian literature have had an enduring influence on Uighur culture, even as the use of Persian has declined and modernity has erected a divide between “classical” and “modern” literature. While recent discussions of the Persianate have widened to incorporate reference to China, the specific institutions that served to maintain a Persian-influenced literary idiom among China’s Turkic-speaking Muslims are yet to receive serious scholarly attention. Brophy focuses on the continuation of practices of literary patronage into the Qing period (1636–1912), specifically using a family from the oasis of Khotan as a case study to highlight both continuities and transformations in the circulation of texts and the structure of patronage networks during the Qing.

Fani, Aria, Kevin L. Schwartz, and Samuel Hodgkin. “Pathways to Persotopias.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 299–306.

The authors contend that the Persianate should be understood as a method—as opposed to a cultural unity to be nostalgically celebrated—for apprehending the transhistorical, transregional, and multilingual dimensions of cultural production before the rise of nation-states. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persian lost its primacy in many communities under the pressures of British, Russian, and Chinese colonialism, the romantic ideal of monolingualism, and vernacular state schooling.  Despite such changes to the configuration of the global system, Persianate cultural norms were redeployed, reimagined, and regenerated in new cultural guises and in national and transnational contexts. Yet, the term Persianate, which prescribes a transregional understanding of premodern and early modern world-making, has been splintered in modernity into national cultures problematically understood as discrete and bounded. The authors therefore ask what alternative frameworks could enable us to track the changing modalities and social contexts of Persian literature in the twenty-first century.

Ferreira, Nicole. “What is the Value of the Persianate to Afghan Studies? or, What Can Afghan History Tell Us about the Persianate? Lessons from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 307–313.

In the late sixteenth century, Afghans living in the Mughal Empire (1526–1858) began to write the first histories of the Afghan qaum (“community”). Their language of choice was Persian, a cosmopolitan language shared across empires from the Ottoman Balkans to Bengal. Ferreira shows how the first generation of Afghan history writers found resonance for their experiences in the classics of Persian letters, which they adapted to describe the origins of their community. She then shows how their distinctive application of the ideas and aesthetics of Persian literature illustrates largely unexplored possibilities of the so-called Persianate. Afghans of the early modern period drew on a set of discourses characterized by humor and the subversion of elite norms to construct a compelling vision of Afghan identity at once recognizable to and respected by the diverse members of the Persianate world.

Gandhi, Supriya. “Fraught Intimacies: Persian and Hindu Publics in Colonial India.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 338–344.

Gandhi examines the concept of the Persianate through Light on Nonviolence, a Persian book published in India in 1899. The Persianate is often associated with cosmopolitanism, pluralism, a culture of civility, and the development of a common literary canon. Light on Nonviolence, however, does not seek to find common ground between peoples. It resists the frameworks of hybridity or harmonious coexistence and instead addresses a distinctly Hindu public, advocating the moral reform of elite, upper-caste Hindus during a time of fierce religious polemics between Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and various Hindu groups. Through Light on Nonviolence, we can glimpse intimacies that are today unthinkable—where the world of Persian letters and political Hinduism intersect. In this article, Ghandi uses intimacy as an analytical tool, a concept with multiple valences and implications, connoting both affection and friction, closeness as well as separation, belonging but also ambivalence. The writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hindus who engaged with Persian learning constitute an archive of such intimacies.

Green, Nile. “The Persianate as Comparative Literature: A Concept in Search of a Method.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 360–367.

This year (2024) marks the fiftieth anniversary of the dissemination of the concept of the “Persianate” in Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam (1974). For Hodgson, the concept of the Persianate was meant to capture two related mechanisms of “cultural orientation”: (1) the adoption of literary Persian itself by a range of different peoples; (2) Persian’s impact on the development of various other literary languages of Islam. The term Persianate is therefore an inherently comparative literary concept, originally coined to describe languages influenced by Persian as much as Persian itself. Yet the more encompassing concept of the Persianate has all too often been used simply to refer to Persian literary culture, leaving its larger interlinguistic potential unrealized. Drawing together the themes explored in this PMLA special feature, Green considers the methodological demands of developing a more robustly comparative—and interaction-based—approach to the Persianate.

Jabbari, Alexander. “Remembering the Persianate in the Modern Novel.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 345–350.

The memory of the Persianate looms large in the era of nation-states. Whether we identify the twentieth century as “late” or “post-” Persianate, or as an era of “Persianate modernity,” it is clear that this cosmopolitan framework—usually described as enduring from the ninth to the nineteenth century—did not vanish overnight, nor did it fade without leaving behind literary traces. Jabbari explores how the Persianate is evoked in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Persian and English fiction. He first considers modern Iranian novels in Persian from the 1960s and 1970s and then turns to the anglophone novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. 1948). A close reading of these texts, with particular attention to their Indian characters, shows that the Persianate cosmopolis left lasting traces in modern literature.

Nersessian, Anahid, and Manu Samriti Chander. “The Aestheticization of Persia from Kant to Hegel.” PMLA 139, no. 2 (2024): 314–320

The case of “the Persianate” and the role played in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy by the uncertain, even volatile racialization of Western and Central Asian cultures provide a particularly compelling set of lenses through which to assess the ideological assumptions and claims of Enlightenment aesthetics. The path from race to politics runs directly through the beautiful, which, for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831) and Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), was bound up with the future of the human species; this path crosses the Persianate world, which signifies both a region spanning Eastern Europe to South Asia (and beyond) and a shifting set of fantasies about specific parts of the globe. The authors ask what happens when we situate Kant and Hegel in contiguity to those across the Persianate world. What happens when we include Kant’s Königsberg and Hegel’s Berlin as sites of Persianate cultural production? Why don’t we ask about the influence of the Persianate on Europe?

PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Since 1884, PMLA has published members’ essays judged to be of interest to scholars and teachers of language and literature. Four issues each year—released in January, March, May, and October—present essays on language and literature. The program for the association’s annual convention is printed in a September issue.