Introduction

Kia, Mana; Marashi, Afshin

doi:10.1215/1089201x-3698947

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…Held together in this light, questions emerge on the relationship between knowledge and power, across and between centers and peripheries. In the traditional, often romanticized conception of cosmopolitanism, shared languages and identities like Persian create a cultural and political order that transcends the local, obfuscating centers and peripheries as points of reference (Pollock 2006: 10; Kia and Marashi 2016: 380). During the Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism campaign, however, many of the measures taken to ostracize kosmopolity from society involved regular monitoring of peripheral Soviet nations from Soviet centers like Moscow, exporting Russian cultural figures to the peripheries to help shape new national identities and cultures there, and sidelining “rootless” intellectuals who did not associate closely enough to a national, socialist identity (Tomoff 2004).…”

Section: Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opera as Critical “Synthesis”: Theorizing the Interface between Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism

O’Connor

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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For centuries, European operas have portrayed dramatic, exotic Others on stage. However, as opera is increasingly adopted around the world, including by those “Eastern” Others it orientalized, its Othering tendencies serve new, more critical purposes. Post-colonial studies of knowledge and cultural production have shown how relations between centers and peripheries, knowledge and power are integral to forms of orientalism. In Tajikistan, the accounts of opera told today by the daughter of a successful Soviet Tajik composer bring to light the ambiguity of power relations and positionalities in Soviet opera’s production. Her accounts, beyond highlighting opera’s readily apparent orientalist tendencies, reveal surprising cosmopolitan aspirations in Soviet Central Asian opera. Cosmopolitan histories and values also feature heavily in post-colonial politics of knowledge production, but the concept appears worlds apart from, even in opposition to that of orientalism: the latter feeds off center-periphery, knowledge-power relations, while the former aspires to evade them. Through this present-day account of opera’s development in Soviet Tajikistan, this article challenges this opposition, theorizing a conceptual ambiguity and interdependence between orientalism and cosmopolitanism, which has important consequences for knowledge-producing fields like opera, as well as anthropology. Multiple forms of orientalism and cosmopolitanism overlapped and interacted in the development of Soviet Central Asian opera as numerous, intersecting meanings and socio-political agendas went into its production. Ultimately, a conceptual space emerges between the orientalism(s) and cosmopolitanism(s) at play. This ambiguous space in-between offers a lens for critically evaluating the complex, uneven practice of portraying and engaging with Others.

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Section: Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism In Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opera as Critical “Synthesis”: Theorizing the Interface between Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism

O’Connor

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity: Translating from Urdu to Persian in Twentieth-Century Iran and Afghanistan

Jabbari

2022

Iran. stud.

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This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian literature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. The article offers a close, comparative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in order to understand why two Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage, yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran’s and Afghanistan’s differing relationships to India and Urdu, produced distinct approaches to translation.

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Forlorn Arabs and Flying Americans: National Identity in the Early Childhood Curriculum of Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979–2009

Malekzadeh

2022

Iran. stud.

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Drawing upon three decades of postrevolutionary textbooks, this article traces the development of the Arab Muslim as a recurring character in the early elementary curriculum of the Islamic Republic, set against the historical context of Iranian modernization and state formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Sympathy for the Arab by the postrevolutionary state included a rebuke and an affirmation: Look at what has happened to the Arabs who were not able to defend their homes and their homeland, and look at what has not happened to us. Set against the Palestinian Arab figure are the accomplishments of American scientists and inventors who feature prominently in the postrevolutionary curriculum as sources of emulation for young readers. Star turns from Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville and Wilbur Wright invite a reconsideration of the role of the foreign Other in the construction of Iranian national identity, notably the expectation that the dispossessed constitute natural allies in Iran's ceaseless struggle against “the West.” Islamization of the primary school curriculum since 1979 has not come at the expense of Iranian national identity but as its expression, elucidating the ways postrevolutionary educational materials can serve as a repository for tracing the continuities and permutations in depicting the Arab or Western Other as well as different civilizational ethos of the Islamic and Persianate world across time.

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Introduction

Abstract: Mana Kia and Afshin Marashi's introduction asks the main question that the articles in the special section “After the Persianate” endeavor to answer: How should we write the histories of societies that emerged from the Persianate ecumene in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

Cited by 11 publications

References 17 publications

Opera as Critical “Synthesis”: Theorizing the Interface between Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism

Opera as Critical “Synthesis”: Theorizing the Interface between Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism

From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity: Translating from Urdu to Persian in Twentieth-Century Iran and Afghanistan

Forlorn Arabs and Flying Americans: National Identity in the Early Childhood Curriculum of Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979–2009

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