- Nationalism, Persian Literature, Indian studies, South Asian Studies, Gender and Sexuality, British Empire, and 21 moreIranian Studies, Cultural History, Feminist Theory, Shi'ism, Islamic Studies, Middle East Studies, Colonial Modernity, Travel Writing, Autobiography, Gender and Politics, History of Iran, Women's movement, Iranian History, Histories of Feminisms, Early Modern History, Friendship, Islamic History, Mughal History, Historiography, Central Asian Studies, and Safavids (Islamic History)edit
- My interests include the connected social, cultural, intellectual histories of West, Central, and South Asia from the... moreMy interests include the connected social, cultural, intellectual histories of West, Central, and South Asia from the 17th - 19th centuries. My first book, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, 2020) explores how premodern conceptions of place and origins provided expansive possibilities of Persianate selfhood. I've also published book chapters and articles on travel writing, gendered concepts of modernity, and various aspects of transregional Persianate culture, most recently on older ideas of adab as conceptual subject and object. I'm working on a second book, which outlines how a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical form (adab as culture) was socially and politically enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas between Iran and Hindustan.
I've also begun a project on the ethics of love and loyalty in various transregionally recognizable and ubiquitous forms of companionship as a way to reconceptualize Persianate societies and polities in the 18th and early 19th centuries.edit
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For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the... more
For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation.
With this book, Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form—adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that interlinked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.
With this book, Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form—adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that interlinked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.
Research Interests: Historical Anthropology, Early Modern History, Space and Place, Kinship (Anthropology), South Asian Studies, and 13 moreIranian Studies, Nationalism, Indonesia, Mughal History, Sense of Place, Country-of-Origin Effect, Iranian History, 18th Century, Persian Culture, Indian History, Indo-Persian Cultural History, Persianate Culture in South Asia, and Indo Islamic
This essay aims to stay awhile with the concept of adab (proper asthetic and ethical form) before rushing to the Euro-American concept and practice of literature, which has been the translation of adab common since the late nineteenth... more
This essay aims to stay awhile with the concept of adab (proper asthetic and ethical form) before rushing to the Euro-American concept and practice of literature, which has been the translation of adab common since the late nineteenth century. Against the broader histories of this translation, I focus on the older meaning of adab in early mod- ern Persian traditions and ask what it can show us about how texts come into being and gain meaning within its world. Texts were gifts, created and exchanged within various forms of companionship. Adab was textual form at once aesthetic and ethical. But it also had an important constitutive sociality, beyond the institutional, one unfamiliar to our contemporary understanding of literature. This lingering brings a presumed reading subject into view—a homo amicus, let us say—embedded in and concerned with social relationships. It also proposes that these generative relations provide cues for broadening our array of interpretive practices.
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To be Persian before nationalism was to belong to a generous, plural identity woven through language, kin and manners
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This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about... more
This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about Orientalism, by which Europe makes itself into the West. In early modern Persianate Asia, common representations of place appear in geographical and travel writing. These shared features, which I call ornaments, adorned both places that shared a learned Persian language, Muslim rule, and those beyond, in other parts of Asia and Africa. The presence or absence of these ornaments made the world intelligible for early modern Persians, creating categories of similarity and alterity that were partial, diffuse, and aporetic, defying the self-other distinctions of Orientalism. This form of knowledge about the self and the world then generated the possibility for encounters different from both modern colonial power and the nation-state.
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This response essay engages with the themes of space, sociality, and sources (of pleasure and of scholarship) in Sanjay Subrahmanyam's article in this issue, " The Hidden Face of Surat. " I reflect on how the Persianate adab that was a... more
This response essay engages with the themes of space, sociality, and sources (of pleasure and of scholarship) in Sanjay Subrahmanyam's article in this issue, " The Hidden Face of Surat. " I reflect on how the Persianate adab that was a dominant cultural form in this port city might cause us to mitigate our analytical concepts when approaching phenomena from different historical contexts. I propose historical inquiry as a form of translation, to look for ways of understanding difference and engaging across it that may or may not be the same as European cosmopolitanism. Keywords Persianate – cosmopolitanism – difference – translation – adab – Indian Ocean
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“Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36,3 (2016): 398-417.
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in, Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015). Under pressures of looming European imperialism, Iran’s declining economic, social and political position was seen as the result... more
in, Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Under pressures of looming European imperialism, Iran’s declining economic, social and political position was seen as the result of collective moral degradation. Justice as rule of law was seen as a necessary prerequisite for the restoration of moral refinement that would restore Iran’s place in the hierarchy of civilizations. A central emotion in this figuring was shame, linking individual moral abasement to the abrogation of political sovereignty. By the close of the nineteenth century, with the rise of mass politics and moveable type printing that enlarged the public sphere, emphasis had shifted to the centrality of individual moral refinement for the establishment of justice. Older Persianate ideas of civility, of moral refinement as idealized masculinity, were linked to the restoration of civilization. This linkage was made by extending the inviolability of masculine honour to the body politic.
Under pressures of looming European imperialism, Iran’s declining economic, social and political position was seen as the result of collective moral degradation. Justice as rule of law was seen as a necessary prerequisite for the restoration of moral refinement that would restore Iran’s place in the hierarchy of civilizations. A central emotion in this figuring was shame, linking individual moral abasement to the abrogation of political sovereignty. By the close of the nineteenth century, with the rise of mass politics and moveable type printing that enlarged the public sphere, emphasis had shifted to the centrality of individual moral refinement for the establishment of justice. Older Persianate ideas of civility, of moral refinement as idealized masculinity, were linked to the restoration of civilization. This linkage was made by extending the inviolability of masculine honour to the body politic.
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This essay examines the role and meaning of Shaykh Mushrif al-Dīn “Saʻdī” Shīrāzī’s Gulistān in late Mughal India. As the prose primer for a Persian education, the Gulistān encompassed the double meaning of adab, as exemplar both... more
This essay examines the role and meaning of Shaykh Mushrif al-Dīn “Saʻdī” Shīrāzī’s Gulistān in late Mughal India. As the prose primer for a Persian education, the Gulistān encompassed the double meaning of adab, as exemplar both of literary form and of proper conduct. I explore instances in which the original text is cited in the work of Sirāj al-Din ʻAli Khān Ārzū (1689-1756 CE), a scholar and poet, who also wrote a commentary on the text. I then explore the larger context of Ārzū’s life and work in the context of mid- eighteenth-century Delhi, to situate the stakes of social and literary adab in a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval. Patronized by high-ranking Mughal officials, Ārzū was engaged in a larger project of recouping the cultural prestige of the imperial capital as political power devolved to regional centers in the face of factional politics and external invasion. Such an analysis seeks to historicize particular readings of classical texts of Persianate education.
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Research Interests: Cultural History, Persian Literature, Iranian Studies, History of Iran, Iranian Modern History, and 9 moreHistory of geography, Persianate History, Indo-Persian Historiography, History of Early Modern Times (Iran), Indo-Persian Cultural History, Islam and Sufism in South Asia, Persianate Societies, Persian Historiography, and Collection of Biographies (Tazkirahs)
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Syllabus for 4000 level (graduate and upper level undergraduate) discussion seminar.