I’m reading some material in cognitive science to develop an understanding of the role of embodiment in cognition and thus in cultural development and phenomena. This I feel is essential both in understanding the encounters between Iranians and Europeans and…
Amanat’s reading of the poem, in “Iranian Idenity Boundaries: A Historical Overview:” In this masterful ghazal Hafez seems to be lamenting the tragic fall of his beloved patron, Abu Eshaq the prince ruler of the house of Inju. In AH…
در طی خواندن مقاله ای در مورد هویت ایرانی نوشته عباس امانت، به این فکر میکنم که احتمالا، و شاید به نحوی نه کاملًا خودآگاهانه، این پروژه را برای این در دست گرفته ام که به «ایرانی بودن» بیندیشم، و…
From Refashioning Iran, pp. 33-34: The challenge of postcolonial historiography is to re-historicize the processes that have been concealed and ossified by the Eurocentric accounts of modernity. This challenge also involves uncovering the underside of “occidental rationality.” Such a project…
From Refashioning Iran, p 33: The obliteration of the intellectual contributions of Persianate scholars to the formation of Orientalism coincided with the late eighteenth-century emergence of authorship as a principle of textual attribution and creditation in Europe. The increases significance…
From Refashioning Iran, p 32: Based on these and other collated texts, it seems that in its formative phase European students of the Orient, rather than initiating “original” and “scientific” studies, had relied heavily on research findings of native scholars.…
From Refashioning Iran, p20: The modular histories of Orientalism grounded exclusively in a European context the intellectual contributions of Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Sir William Jones (1746-94), and other “pioneering” Orientalists. This historiographical selection played a strategic role in constituting “the West”…
From Refashioning Iran, p 18: The formation of Orientalism as an area of European academic inquiry was grounded on a “genesis amnesia” that systematically obliterated the dialogic conditions of its emergence and the production of its linguistic and textual tools.…
From Refashioning Iran, p 17: Exclusion of these “homeless texts” from national historical canons, on the one hand, has contributed to the hegemony of Eurocentric and Orientalist conceptions of modernity as something uniquely European. On the other hand, by ignoring…