My current monograph, titled Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (University of Texas Press, March 2024), examines the historical process by which a new discourse of literature, called adabiyāt in Persian, was made institutionally thinkable, culturally authoritative, and socially prevalent in the early twentieth century. It identifies early twentieth-century anjomans, or literary associations, as the main site for the production and proliferation of this new mode of literary knowledge. By focusing on literary associations, I challenge the misconception that charting a national domain for Persian literature —a distinctly transregional literary tradition— was limited to Iran or that it exclusively involved contact with European literary culture. The intellectual nature and context in which literary associations operated illustrate that Iran and Afghanistan were fully conversant with each other as much as they were with global interlocutors.
Often used as a shorthand for strictly local, I argue that the term “national” in this period should be defined as intensely and programmatically global. In analyzing the work of two generations of Iranian and Afghan intellectuals, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which they brought their countries into closer alignment with an emerging world in which literature functioned as an essential identitarian discourse. They did so not by working within ready-made models borrowed wholesale from Europe, but by critically working at the intersection of their classical literary heritage and the discursive demands of nationalism.
While my first monograph deals with the discursive apparatus that presides over our understanding of what Persian literature is or is not, my scholarly articles have focused on the aesthetic features of Persian literary texts. My chapter on the poetry of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, published in the Oxford Handbook of Artistic Citizenship (2016), recovers the transnational aesthetics of a poetic movement often portrayed as strictly political. My article on the poetry of Bizhan Jalali (Iranian Studies 50:4, 2017) examines the development of the tradition of free verse (she‘r-e sepid) in the 1960s and 1970s in Iran. For a separate project, I am preparing a book-length manuscript of Jalali’s poetry in English translation, titled Shades of Silence. My introduction explores how Jalali’s critical approach to prosody informs his philosophical perspective. My next scholarly article investigates nineteenth-century translation culture in Iran. I aim to show how current preoccupations with fidelity and originality gradually took form during this period, paving the way for the emergence of ontological nationalism and its fixation on singular literary traditions as self-contained entities.
In 2018-19, I received a grant from the University of California to focus on the large corpus of Persian literary journals printed in Iran, Afghanistan and their diasporas. In the near future, I will post an extensive list of those journals (editor, place of publication, where you may access them, etc) on my blog.
You can access my work on academia.edu. You can contact me at ariafani[at]uw[dot]edu