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…
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…
From Refashioning Iran, p 16-17: The conventional Persian literary histories […] regard poetry as a characteristically Iranian mode of self-expression. With the privileged position of poetry in the invented national mentalite, the prose texts of teh humanities are devalued and…
From Refashioning Iran, p 16: By anticipating a period of decline that paved the way for the British colonization, historians of Mughal India have searched predominantly for facts taht illustrate the backwardness and the disintegration of this empire. Mughal historiography…