Alexander Jabbari | University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (original) (raw)

Books by Alexander Jabbari

Cambridge University Press, 2023

From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far ... more From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.

Papers by Alexander Jabbari

Comparative Literature Studies, 2024

In this short reflection on the responses to The Making of Persianate Modernity, the author offer... more In this short reflection on the responses to The Making of Persianate Modernity, the author offers thoughts on the methodology of literary history, on the relationship between history and literature, and on the politics of historical research in general and Persianate studies in particular.

PMLA, 2024

The memory of the Persianate looms large in the era of nation-states. Whether we identify the twe... more 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. I explore here how the Persianate is evoked in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Persian and English fiction. I first consider modern Iranian novels in Persian from the 1960s and 1970s and then turn 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.

Philological Encounters, 2023

Philological Encounters, 2023

This article considers how sound—especially Persian phonology, but also music—and gender came tog... more This article considers how sound—especially Persian phonology, but also music—and gender came together in articulating an Iranian national identity distinct from the Persianate past. Through analysis of the film The Lor Girl as well as close readings of poetry from the first half of the twentieth century by Nasīm-i Shumāl, Parvīz Khaṭībī, and poet-laureate Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the article demonstrates how an erotic attachment to language was fostered, in which the very phonology of Persian became the object of desire. Pharyngeal consonants became markers of Arab male sexual deviancy against which a feminized Iranian nation was to be protected. This eroticized discourse of language also contributed to establishing the Tehrani dialect as the Iranian national standard. The article considers how nationalism and modernity impacted the Iranian soundscape, as well as the impact of developments in Iran on Persian and Urdu in South Asia.

Journal of Persianate Studies, 2023

Mohammad-Taqi Bahār's 1942 textbook Sabkshenāsi ("Stylistics") was a landmark text in modern Pers... more Mohammad-Taqi Bahār's 1942 textbook Sabkshenāsi ("Stylistics") was a landmark text in modern Persian literary studies. It coined terms (like sabk-e Hendi or the "Indian style" of Persian poetry) and laid out a tripartite, geographical-temporal model for the history of Persian poetry which largely remain dominant today. Bahār's articulation of a national canon of Iranian literature (comprising writings in various stages of the Persian language as well as Arabic) made Sabkshenāsi an important text not only for the nascent department of Persian literature at the University of Tehran for which it was written, but for twentieth-century Iranian nationalism in general. By combining traditional forms of knowledge with the methodologies pioneered by European Orientalists, it played an important role in modernizing Persian literary studies. The influential introduction to Sabkshenāsi is translated here into English in full for the first time, along with a preface explaining the work's importance for Persian literary studies.

Iranian Studies, 2022

This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian... more 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.

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022

The thirteenth-century Gulistān (“Rose Garden”), a didactic prosimetrum by Sa‘di of Shiraz (1210–... more The thirteenth-century Gulistān (“Rose Garden”), a didactic prosimetrum by Sa‘di of Shiraz (1210–91 or 1292 CE), is among the best-known and most widely read works in the history of Persian literature. For centuries, study of this mirror for princes was a traditional staple of education throughout the Persianate world. Its status as a core text for teaching literary and social sensibilities in India made it the subject of particular interest for British Orientalists, who translated the Gulistān into English on more than ten separate occasions before the twentieth century. This chapter looks closely and comparatively at several English translations of the Gulistān from British India, examining choices made in translation and analyzing the various approaches to translation. In doing so, it argues that these translations of the Gulistān should be understood as British Orientalists’ participation in Persianate adab.

International Journal of Islam in Asia, 2020

This article examines the translation and domestication of an important piece of Persian didactic... more This article examines the translation and domestication of an important piece of Persian didactic literature, the Gulistān of Sa‘di, into modern Chinese. We address all of the Chinese translations of this text, focusing on Yang Wanbao’s translation published in 2000. Yang transforms the text according to the imperatives of the Chinese state, altering the homoerotic scenes of the original and rendering Sufi Islamic concepts in a Confucian or Buddhist idiom. The result is a translation that serves as a significant text for the Jahriyya Sufi order in China, but also an articulation of Chinese Islam countenanced by the People’s Republic.

This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scho... more This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scholarly exchange between Iranians and Indians reworking their shared Persianate literary heritage, considering literary history as an important and perhaps overlooked site for the production of literary modernity. Arguing for a verbal as well as textual discourse of modernity shared between early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian intellectuals, Jabbari examines how these intellectuals made use of premodern materials for their modernizing projects, and how nationalism shaped this process. Four aspects of modern literary history writing receive particular focus here: engagement with the tazkirah tradition, inclusion of extraliterary national figures alongside poets, use of a shared set of references and sources, and new sexual aesthetics that break with the homoerotic Persianate past.

Organized Conferences by Alexander Jabbari

This symposium features emerging literary scholarship working across and beyond the framework of ... more This symposium features emerging literary scholarship working across and beyond the framework of national literature in order to examine the histories of literary modernity that took place under different names and yet drew on shared vocabulary across the Persianate world around the turn of the twentieth century. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a growing conversation around the 'Persianate world,' an expanse of Eurasia defined by shared Persian aesthetic, literary, and moral forms (adab) which served as a field of connection and exchange from roughly the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Some have conceived of the Persianate as a zone of connectivity tied to the cultural/literary capital of Persian language, while others have taken adab and a shared Persian literary canon to be the locus of the Persianate. Bringing together scholars working across Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Armenian, and other languages, this symposium moves the conversation around the Persianate forward in time to address questions of literary modernity. How can the shared textual traditions of the Persianate offer an alternative model to the framework of comparison rooted in European national literatures? What happened to the interconnected, multilingual Persianate zone and its shared intellectual vocabulary in the wake of modern literature? How did the politics of disaffiliation and national distinction shape literary form and language ideology in the Persianate long nineteenth century?

"The World of the Tazkirah: Sources for Study of the Premodern Persianate Lands" a conference at ... more "The World of the Tazkirah: Sources for Study of the Premodern Persianate Lands"
a conference at UC Irvine
Friday, February 5th, 2016
http://sites.uci.edu/tazkirah/

The tazkirah is a premodern genre of writing with a long history in Persian and Arabic literature, as well as in the literatures they influenced such as Urdu, Turkish, and others. Essentially a type of biographical dictionary or anthology, tazkirahs could cover a range of figures, including Sufi saints, religious scholars, political notables, and poets. This conference draws together scholars from across academic disciplines and linguistic traditions who use tazkirahs as sources for their research. What can tazkirahs tell us not only about their subjects, but about their authors, and the literary traditions and historical conditions to which they belonged? What innovative methodologies can be brought to bear upon these texts? For what types of inquiry can they be fruitful? How can interdisciplinary work bring new approaches to the study of tazkirahs and the contexts in which they were produced? This conference may help to answer these and other questions through original research presented by the conference participants.

Book Reviews by Alexander Jabbari

International Journal of Persian Literature, 2022

Review of Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh ... more Review of Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) for International Journal of Persian Literature (2022) 7: 151–156.

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2020

Review of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, eds., Persian Literature and Modernity: Produ... more Review of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, eds., Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 2019) for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 83:2 (June 2020)

Dissertation Reviews, May 19, 2014

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Reviews of my work by others by Alexander Jabbari

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2024

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), ... more The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Daniel Majchrowicz

Iranian Studies, 2023

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), ... more The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Samuel Hodgkin.

Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, 2023

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), ... more The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Kristof Szitar.

Cambridge University Press, 2023

From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far ... more From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2024

In this short reflection on the responses to The Making of Persianate Modernity, the author offer... more In this short reflection on the responses to The Making of Persianate Modernity, the author offers thoughts on the methodology of literary history, on the relationship between history and literature, and on the politics of historical research in general and Persianate studies in particular.

PMLA, 2024

The memory of the Persianate looms large in the era of nation-states. Whether we identify the twe... more 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. I explore here how the Persianate is evoked in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Persian and English fiction. I first consider modern Iranian novels in Persian from the 1960s and 1970s and then turn 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.

Philological Encounters, 2023

Philological Encounters, 2023

This article considers how sound—especially Persian phonology, but also music—and gender came tog... more This article considers how sound—especially Persian phonology, but also music—and gender came together in articulating an Iranian national identity distinct from the Persianate past. Through analysis of the film The Lor Girl as well as close readings of poetry from the first half of the twentieth century by Nasīm-i Shumāl, Parvīz Khaṭībī, and poet-laureate Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the article demonstrates how an erotic attachment to language was fostered, in which the very phonology of Persian became the object of desire. Pharyngeal consonants became markers of Arab male sexual deviancy against which a feminized Iranian nation was to be protected. This eroticized discourse of language also contributed to establishing the Tehrani dialect as the Iranian national standard. The article considers how nationalism and modernity impacted the Iranian soundscape, as well as the impact of developments in Iran on Persian and Urdu in South Asia.

Journal of Persianate Studies, 2023

Mohammad-Taqi Bahār's 1942 textbook Sabkshenāsi ("Stylistics") was a landmark text in modern Pers... more Mohammad-Taqi Bahār's 1942 textbook Sabkshenāsi ("Stylistics") was a landmark text in modern Persian literary studies. It coined terms (like sabk-e Hendi or the "Indian style" of Persian poetry) and laid out a tripartite, geographical-temporal model for the history of Persian poetry which largely remain dominant today. Bahār's articulation of a national canon of Iranian literature (comprising writings in various stages of the Persian language as well as Arabic) made Sabkshenāsi an important text not only for the nascent department of Persian literature at the University of Tehran for which it was written, but for twentieth-century Iranian nationalism in general. By combining traditional forms of knowledge with the methodologies pioneered by European Orientalists, it played an important role in modernizing Persian literary studies. The influential introduction to Sabkshenāsi is translated here into English in full for the first time, along with a preface explaining the work's importance for Persian literary studies.

Iranian Studies, 2022

This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian... more 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.

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation, 2022

The thirteenth-century Gulistān (“Rose Garden”), a didactic prosimetrum by Sa‘di of Shiraz (1210–... more The thirteenth-century Gulistān (“Rose Garden”), a didactic prosimetrum by Sa‘di of Shiraz (1210–91 or 1292 CE), is among the best-known and most widely read works in the history of Persian literature. For centuries, study of this mirror for princes was a traditional staple of education throughout the Persianate world. Its status as a core text for teaching literary and social sensibilities in India made it the subject of particular interest for British Orientalists, who translated the Gulistān into English on more than ten separate occasions before the twentieth century. This chapter looks closely and comparatively at several English translations of the Gulistān from British India, examining choices made in translation and analyzing the various approaches to translation. In doing so, it argues that these translations of the Gulistān should be understood as British Orientalists’ participation in Persianate adab.

International Journal of Islam in Asia, 2020

This article examines the translation and domestication of an important piece of Persian didactic... more This article examines the translation and domestication of an important piece of Persian didactic literature, the Gulistān of Sa‘di, into modern Chinese. We address all of the Chinese translations of this text, focusing on Yang Wanbao’s translation published in 2000. Yang transforms the text according to the imperatives of the Chinese state, altering the homoerotic scenes of the original and rendering Sufi Islamic concepts in a Confucian or Buddhist idiom. The result is a translation that serves as a significant text for the Jahriyya Sufi order in China, but also an articulation of Chinese Islam countenanced by the People’s Republic.

This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scho... more This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scholarly exchange between Iranians and Indians reworking their shared Persianate literary heritage, considering literary history as an important and perhaps overlooked site for the production of literary modernity. Arguing for a verbal as well as textual discourse of modernity shared between early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian intellectuals, Jabbari examines how these intellectuals made use of premodern materials for their modernizing projects, and how nationalism shaped this process. Four aspects of modern literary history writing receive particular focus here: engagement with the tazkirah tradition, inclusion of extraliterary national figures alongside poets, use of a shared set of references and sources, and new sexual aesthetics that break with the homoerotic Persianate past.

This symposium features emerging literary scholarship working across and beyond the framework of ... more This symposium features emerging literary scholarship working across and beyond the framework of national literature in order to examine the histories of literary modernity that took place under different names and yet drew on shared vocabulary across the Persianate world around the turn of the twentieth century. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a growing conversation around the 'Persianate world,' an expanse of Eurasia defined by shared Persian aesthetic, literary, and moral forms (adab) which served as a field of connection and exchange from roughly the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Some have conceived of the Persianate as a zone of connectivity tied to the cultural/literary capital of Persian language, while others have taken adab and a shared Persian literary canon to be the locus of the Persianate. Bringing together scholars working across Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Armenian, and other languages, this symposium moves the conversation around the Persianate forward in time to address questions of literary modernity. How can the shared textual traditions of the Persianate offer an alternative model to the framework of comparison rooted in European national literatures? What happened to the interconnected, multilingual Persianate zone and its shared intellectual vocabulary in the wake of modern literature? How did the politics of disaffiliation and national distinction shape literary form and language ideology in the Persianate long nineteenth century?

"The World of the Tazkirah: Sources for Study of the Premodern Persianate Lands" a conference at ... more "The World of the Tazkirah: Sources for Study of the Premodern Persianate Lands"
a conference at UC Irvine
Friday, February 5th, 2016
http://sites.uci.edu/tazkirah/

The tazkirah is a premodern genre of writing with a long history in Persian and Arabic literature, as well as in the literatures they influenced such as Urdu, Turkish, and others. Essentially a type of biographical dictionary or anthology, tazkirahs could cover a range of figures, including Sufi saints, religious scholars, political notables, and poets. This conference draws together scholars from across academic disciplines and linguistic traditions who use tazkirahs as sources for their research. What can tazkirahs tell us not only about their subjects, but about their authors, and the literary traditions and historical conditions to which they belonged? What innovative methodologies can be brought to bear upon these texts? For what types of inquiry can they be fruitful? How can interdisciplinary work bring new approaches to the study of tazkirahs and the contexts in which they were produced? This conference may help to answer these and other questions through original research presented by the conference participants.

International Journal of Persian Literature, 2022

Review of Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh ... more Review of Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) for International Journal of Persian Literature (2022) 7: 151–156.

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2020

Review of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, eds., Persian Literature and Modernity: Produ... more Review of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, eds., Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 2019) for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 83:2 (June 2020)

Dissertation Reviews, May 19, 2014

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2024

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), ... more The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Daniel Majchrowicz

Iranian Studies, 2023

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), ... more The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Samuel Hodgkin.

Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, 2023

The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), ... more The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (2023), reviewed by Kristof Szitar.

Dissertation Reviews, Nov 4, 2014

Review of the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, University of Nebraska (Omaha, Nebraska, United... more Review of the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, University of Nebraska (Omaha, Nebraska, United States).

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“Late Persianate Literary Culture: Modernizing Conventions between Persian and Urdu” examines the... more “Late Persianate Literary Culture: Modernizing Conventions between Persian and Urdu” examines the modernization of Persianate literature and the emergence of modern literary historiography as a shared development between Iran and India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Focusing on the premodern tazkirah (literary anthology) genre as well as literary histories produced for new educational institutions, I examine how modernizing intellectuals and litterateurs appropriated the premodern literary tradition in developing the modern, nationalist genre of Persian literary history. By reading Persian and Urdu texts together, I trace intellectual and literary exchange between Iranians and Indians and contend that the Persianate literary tradition endures through the medium of Urdu. In this way, “Late Persianate Literary Culture” complicates and challenges nationalist assumptions about Persian literature and Iranian intellectual and literary history. I further argue that literary modernization was understood as a set of formal conventions, including standard typography and orthography, punctuation, and simplified prose, as well as thematic conventions, including Victorian-influenced sexual mores and a rise and fall model of history. These conventions were both products of modernizing technologies such as print, but also seen as productive technologies in and of themselves.