Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene

by Hamid Dabashi

Overview

From the Biblical period and Classical Antiquity to the rise of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, aspects of Persian culture have been integral to European history. A diverse constellation of European artists, poets, and thinkers have looked to Persia for inspiration, finding there a rich cultural counterpoint and frame of reference. Interest in all things Persian was no passing fancy but an enduring fascination that has shaped not just Western views but the self-image of Iranians up to the present day. Persophilia maps the changing geography of connections between Persia and the West over the centuries and shows that traffic in ideas about Persia and Persians did not travel on a one-way street.

How did Iranians respond when they saw themselves reflected in Western mirrors? Expanding on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, and overcoming the limits of Edward Said, Hamid Dabashi answers this critical question by tracing the formation of a civic discursive space in Iran, seeing it as a prime example of a modern nation-state emerging from an ancient civilization in the context of European colonialism. The modern Iranian public sphere, Dabashi argues, cannot be understood apart from this dynamic interaction.

Persophilia takes into its purview works as varied as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Handel’s Xerxes and Puccini’s Turandot, and Gauguin and Matisse’s fascination with Persian art. The result is a provocative reading of world history that dismantles normative historiography and alters our understanding of postcolonial nations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674495791
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/12/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	295
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction Orientalism Panning to “the East” Persophilia Decentering “the West” Liberating a World The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Chapter 1. Distant Memories of the Biblical and Classical Heritage Cyrus and Thomas Jefferson What’s Cyrus to him or he to Xerxes? Inventing the Persians Verities of Orientalist Behavior The Pre- and Post-Westphalian Worlds The Floating Cylinder Chapter 2. Montesquieu, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Rise of Persian Liberal Nationalism The Persian Letters in French Akhondzadeh and a Transnational Public Sphere The Paraphrased Persians The Fall and Rise of Cultural Hegemonies Chapter 3. Sir William Jones, Orientalist Philology, and Persian Linguistic Nationalism The Origin of Persian Linguistic Nationalism Structural Transmutations of the Bourgeois Public Sphere Latinizing the Persian Script Persian Linguistic Nationalism Chapter 4. Goethe, Hegel, Hafez, and Company European Enlightenment and Persian Humanism Paraphrased Persian and British Colonialism Goethe, Romanticism, and Hafez Hegel, History, and Persophilia Romanticism, Mysticism, Fascism The Moving Specter of Fascism Chapter 5. From Romanticism to Pan-Islamism to Transcendentalism The Center Cannot Hold The Widening Gyre Muhammad Iqbal and Pan-Islamism Emerson and Transcendentalism Circulatory Capital and Its Cultures of Resistance Chapter 6. Nietzsche, Hafez, Mozart, Zarathustra, and the Making of a Persian Dionysus Hafez as Nietzsche’s Dionysus Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Hafez, and Mozart Dionysus at Large Chapter 7. Edward FitzGerald and the Rediscovery of Omar Khayyám for Persian Nihilism The Three-Dimensional Subject The Elliptical Curve Erotic Asceticism Hedayat’s Khayyám Chapter 8. Matthew Arnold, Philosophical Pessimism, and the Rise of Iranian Epic Nationalism “And the First Grey of Morning Fill’d the East” Shahnameh as a “National Epic” A Genealogy of the Postcolonial Subject Chapter 9. James Morier, Hajji Baba of Ispahan, and the Rise of a Proxy Public Sphere James Morier’s Adventures A Proxy Public Sphere Chapter 10. Picturing Persia in the Visual and Performing Arts Performing the Bourgeois in the Public Sphere Persophilia in the Opera Painting Persian Performing on the Persian Stage Chapter 11. E. G. Browne, Persian Literature, and the Making of a Transnational Literary Public Sphere From an Imperial Heritage A Transnational Literary Public Sphere Old Wine, New Bottles Transnational East and West Persian Gone Public Chapter 12. Persica Spiritualis: Nicholson, Schimmel, Corbin, and Their Consequences Romancing Rumi The View from the Edge From the Ruins of Modernity Collapsing the Center and Its Peripheries Conclusion Persophilia at Large From Said to Habermas and Beyond Romancing Persia Notes Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

Generates new ways of thinking about global culture that do away with tired dichotomies such as East and West, center and periphery, and tradition and modernity…[An] urgent and impressive accomplishment.

Critical Inquiry - Shaj Mathew

Hamid Dabashi’s scholarly investigation into Persophilia—the attraction that Iran’s literary humanism held for giants of European culture including Mozart, Goethe, and Nietzsche—turns simplistic views of ‘Orientalism’ upside down. His penetrating account of a global conversation lasting centuries forces us to rethink tired old clichés about European cultural hegemony.

Malise Ruthven

A work of quietly revolutionary insight. By following the work of Persian art and literature not only out of its original courtly environment and into conflict and often collusion with the West, Dabashi adds a much-needed undercurrent to the entire school of thought that originated with Said’s Orientalism.

The National - Steve Donoghue

New insight into the way Europeans conceived of and shaped representations of Persian literature, culture, and aesthetics…Provides us with a Persian counterpart to Edward Said’s Orientalism…An ambitious text that by its very nature will spark debate amongst scholars specializing in the innumerable fields it discusses.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature - Leila Moayeri Pazargadi

Hamid Dabashi tells an elegant and startling story about the significance of Persian culture in Western society, and how Western ideas about Persian culture shaped modern Iran’s notions of its antiquity and literary history.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

A lively and erudite account of Persophilia…Whenever Dabashi discusses particular writers, Iranian or Western, his enthusiasm brims over; his love for literature, whether in Persian or English, German or French, shines through and animates his prose…His astute capsule descriptions of 19th- and 20th-century Iranian writers, most of whom remain unknown in the West, will come as both provocative and enlightening to even the most jaded Persophile.

Literary Review - Eric Ormsby