How Modern is the Persianate? Aesthetics and Politics of a Scholarly Category

ABSTRACT The introduction to this forum on Alexander Jabbari’s monograph The Making of Persianate Modernity (2023) introduces the scholarly conversation about Persianate literary modernity that has recently developed, and clarifies Jabbari’s role in drawing these conversations together into a coherent subfield. The article situates this book in the historiography of the Persianate as a conceptual category and an object of critique, with particular attention to its extension into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the politics of Persianate modernity as a category for post-Cold War scholarship in the West and beyond.