The Persianate Studies Workshop at the University of Michigan is delighted to host a virtual writing workshop with Dr. Aria Fani, who will be presenting a paper titled: “Disciplinizing Persian Literature: The Case of Twentieth-century Afghanistan“. The event will take place on Zoom from 5:30-7 pm (EST) on Monday, January 25, 2021.
This paper is part of a broader project that deals with the rise of Persian literature as an institution in Iran and Afghanistan. It deals with how a cadre of professionals in twentieth-century Afghanistan set to create the first encyclopedia in the Persian language, one anchored in their local environment. What would the history of Persian literature look like as an academic discipline? More precisely, how and for what purpose was Persian literature in the twentieth century placed within disciplinary formations embedded in which lie different sets of literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reify it as an object of academic study and national veneration? This article focuses on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlines the socio-historical processes that helped to transform Persian literature into a social enterprise in that country. One outcome of these processes was the production of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949-1979) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia in Persian. A critical examination of parts of this seminal text illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 50s. Ultimately, the article places Āryānā squarely within a transnational and multilingual ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.
Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington. He also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Iranian Studies. Aria spent the first eighteen years of his life in Shiraz (12 of which was a siesta) and has lived in California and Mexico before moving to Washington State in 2019. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature from San Diego State University and his Ph.D. in Persian Studies at U.C. Berkeley. In addition to research and teaching, Aria engages in social advocacy for Central American asylum seekers in the U.S. If you are ever in Seattle, you can find him wolfing down a Cuban sandwich at Bongos Cafe every Friday evening at 5:35 PM.
Please RSVP to Shahla Farghadani at (sfarghad@umich.edu) for a Zoom link and a copy of Fani’s paper.