Some quotes from R. Bosnak, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel. Bold emphasis is mine. The most absolute and unmediated form of embodied imagination is a dream. It instantaneously presents a total world, so real that you are…
Mirza I’tisam al-Din’s travelogue Shigarfnamah Velayat is believed to be the first Persianate travelogue about Europe. As I read a translation in English (I haven’t yet been able to find a Farsi version), once again I am struck by the…
I have been working at my local public library branch for most of this week. I come here every morning and station myself at the corner table in the children’s section. I like working in the children’s section primarily because…
چند یادداشتی که امروز اضافه کردم(در مورد تریزیا شرلی و جوزف امین) اشاره میکنند به مشکل بزرگی که من با هویت و تاریخ نگاری معمول ایران دارم، به خصوص در رابطه با چند قرن گذشته و غرب. معمولا ایران به…
Since I read Said’s Orientalism many years ago, I’ve been wondering why we don’t have a parallel branch of “knowledge” labeled Occidentalism. Well, it actually seems pretty obvious why: Orientalism is a colonial discourse produced as part of Western expansion…
In passing, Tavakoli-Targhi lists Joseph Emin as another Iranian traveler to Europe who wrote an account of his journey: Joseph Emin (1726-1809), a native of Hamadan, was another traveler who visited England in 1751 and wrote an account of his…
Even when I was studying fine art in Iran (its abortion by Islamic Cultural Revolution notwithstanding), I knew more about the history of European art than that of Iran. Like many of my peers, I assumed that European portraiture influence…
This is a quick note and a place holder to return to the historical figure and to the general topic of the “Persianate woman” in Europe. From Refashioning Iran: In the first decades of the seventeenth century, an Iranian woman…
Tavakoli-Targhi uses “Persianate Europology” in reference to writings about Europe by Persian chroniclers. I’m beginning to see the utility of Persianate as it refers to cultural production in and outside geographical borders of Iran (whose territorial lines are still unclear…
In thinking about the relations of Iran and the West questions arise immediately about the definitions of the two terms. While “the West” signifies some ambiguous geographical/cultural/racial/political entity that is understood to be non-homogenous by virtue of the fact that…