Apr. 9: Persianate Selves

Commemorating Collectives at the End of Empire

Lecture

This talk explores practices of commemoration and what they can tell us about Persianate collectives and selves before the concept of the nation. The long 18th century saw the unraveling of the great universal early modern empires of the Safavids and the Mughals. Decades of political instability followed, marked by shifting regional centers of power and multiple invasions. As empires fell, societies faced dispersal, and new polities arose across the 18th century, practices of commemoration proliferated. Analysis of poetic tazkirahs [biographical compendia], which commemorate aesthetically and socially constituted collectives of Persians, offer insight into possibilities for articulating collectives and selves. They included past and contemporary poets as part of an imagined community of ancestors and peers, in which were nested clusters of social relationships. The sheer number and diversity of such texts enable understanding of the many possible ways these collectives could be imagined and their selves brought into being. Pre-modern Persians were from many lands, religions, occupations, social locations, and even genders, though these boundaries possessed aporetic distinctions that require a reassessment of their historical meanings.