Networked Culture: First Panel

Dr Zuzanna Olszewska & Dr James Caron

Note: Internal event not open to external attendees.

Geography’s Sword: The Persianate Literary Past and the Orphans of Nationalism

Dr Zuzanna Olszewska, Oxford University

This paper explores the contradiction between the transregional nature of the Persian literary heritage of the past and the subsequent partitioning of the region into national spaces. For the Afghan refugee poets in Iran who were the subjects of my research, this contradiction strikes at the heart of their literary work and their identities. As non-Iranian nationals, they are subjected both to casual prejudice and legal discrimination in education, mobility, the labour market and access to basic services. Frequent campaigns of round-ups and expulsions reinforce Afghans’ sense of a continually precarious existence in Iran. But as Persian-speakers who share and cultivate the same literary heritage as Iranians, Afghan refugees use poetry as their primary weapon of criticism and self-assertion in Iran, making their claim to inclusion on the basis of linguistic and cultural affinities. I present the work of a number of Afghan poets who are  working to challenge the dominant narratives of exclusion both in contemporary politics and literary historiography.

Pashto Interregionalisms: Empire and Autonomy

Dr James Caron, SOAS

This paper uses the case of Muhammad Nur, an itinerant rural laborer and oral poet of late 19th and early 20th c. Afghanistan, as a point of departure in exploring the long-term legacy of Pashto oral literature in history, and as a form of anti-history. Building on multilingual corpuses in Pashai, Urdu, rural Dari, and Pashto, I demonstrate that oral poetic practices in particular built stable rural ‘milieus of memory’ that stretched from Central Asia to the Deccan Plateau. I argue that these institutions of participative memory emerged in conscious counterpoint to imperial, monarchic, and local authorities that increasingly provincialized rural non-elites. Moreover, I argue that by the early 20th century, non-elite poets devoted direct attention to these cultural institutions as conscious technologies, and projected them as tapping into a transcendental neo-Persianate humanist morality beyond temporality itself. In so doing, they contested an increasing temporal provincialization of non-elite interregional cultural life, in the face of a 'historical' consciousness that undergirded empire but that also underpinned constitutional nationalism and transnational neo-Persianate modernism too. Do these milieus of memory, and the discourses that flow through them, provincialize history as a discipline or help us rethink it?