This special issue addresses questions of literary modernity in the Persianate world. The papers explore the near-simultaneous encroachment of modernity across varied territories and polities (among them South Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman lands) and examine the problematics that emerged as a consequence: language politics (classical, vernacular, demotic, national), national canonization, and the disavowal of Persianate genres and epistemes. Rather than indicating the end of the Persianate framework, however, these processes initiated a new stage of literary realignment, a period we identify as the “late Persianate,” in which connections and exchange continued across borders in spite of shifting political and ideological attachments.
Maryam Fatima, Alexander Jabbari, Mehtap Ozdemir: The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language
Alexander Jabbari: The Sound of Persianate Modernity: Gendered Soundscapes in Modern Iran
Aria Fani: The Shadow-Texts of National History: Poetic Participation in Iran and Afghanistan
Maryam Fatima and Andrew Amstutz: Fashioning a Persianate Offspring for a Modern India: Urdu Visions of Persian Pasts, 1890s–1950s
Fatima Burney: The Veil of Purity: Tropes of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Reform and Ahmad Khan’s naicar
Levi Thompson: A Formal Foundation for Comparative Study of the Late Persianate
Mehtap Ozdemir: Translation after the Persianate? Omar Khayyam and Late Perso-Ottoman Poetic Connectivity
Samuel Hodgkin: The Poetics of Persianate Disaffiliation: Recusative Gestures for a Royal Genre