Comparative Approaches to Persianate Modernity: Forum on Alexander Jabbari’s <i>The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)

This forum brings together scholars of Persianate studies to accomplish two goals: (1) introduce CLS readers to new scholarship on Persianate modernity; (2) initiate a comparative exchange among scholars of the Middle East on questions of comparative methodology, (post)secularism, literary history and literary modernity, poetics and sexuality, and the legacies of orientalist philology.Though most area studies scholars are familiar with the “Persianate turn” in Middle Eastern studies, the implications of this new scholarship have not been explored for comparative literary studies. With the publication of Alexander Jabbari’s book as its occasion, this forum aims to address this gap and map some new directions in the field. Contributors Ceyhun Arslan, Fatima Burney, Samuel Hodgkin, Allison Kanner-Botan, and Levi Thompson, who have shaped the emerging subfield of Persianate studies in their recently published and/or forthcoming first books, were invited to reflect on one or more elements of their choice in Jabbari’s work.Establishing a conversation between Jabbari’s book and their own research in other languages of the Middle East and Eurasia, the forum’s contributors demonstrate that, far from disappearing, the rich and varied cultural forms of the Persianate cosmopolis fundamentally shaped the making of national (and in the Soviet case, multinational) literary modernities and modernisms across the region. Departing from past scholarship that has overemphasized the rupture of colonial modernity, Jabbari and his interlocutors consider continuities in rupture, furnishing scholars of non-European modernities beyond the Persianate world with new analytical concepts and categories to conceptualize the complex heterotemporality of the gendered modern. Breaking with the legacy of philological orientalism that continues to shape the territorial and ethnocentric study of Middle Eastern languages and literatures in the Anglophone academy, they valuably emphasize the necessity of collaborative transregional scholarship across western and south Asia. At the same time, addressing the historical conditions of the emergence of the Persianate as a category, they refuse to idealize it as a political project, cautioning against its potential association with nostalgia for premodern imperial forms. The forum’s essays recognize that Persianate literary heritage was reclaimed and repurposed for other competing imperial projects across the region; for example, the Ottomans drew on the Persianate heritage for the construction of an Ottoman canon, while coding the Persianate difference as Acem. In accounting for the intersections of the Persianate cosmopolis with other literary systems, the forum’s essays call (at least for this editor) for a practice of comparatizing—dare I say, creolizing—the Persianate without giving way to nationalist identitarianism. In explicating the stakes of Jabbari’s book for Anglophone studies and for postcolonial studies, this forum demonstrates that scholarship on Persianate modernity cannot be marginalized as or confined to a minor intellectual inquiry in area studies.