Comparative Approaches to Modern Persian and Arabic Literatures
Panel 164, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 2:30 pm
Panel Description
This panel aims to spotlight works of literary history and criticism that feature an Arabic/Persian comparative methodology. Most research on these literary traditions has treated Arabic and Persian as solely "primary source" languages, while European languages have provided the theory and paradigms as secondary, "research" languages. This, we contend, has blinded us to exploring the possibilities of influence and comparison between these two Middle Eastern literatures themselves, as interrelated, intertextual, and neighboring literary traditions that have historically traded lexicons, genres, and literary theory.
Because Arabic/Persian comparison is particularly scant in research on the modern period, this panel focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our earliest paper deals with the late nineteenth century heyday of Arabic and Persian translations of European literature. It argues that the modernist "nahda paradigm" prevalent in Arabic literary criticism has a little-mentioned but deeply influential analogue in Persian literary criticism and that these paradigms together have contributed to the devaluation of the literary merit and formal legacy of these translated and adapted works.
Similarly, the second paper is a comparative study of early Arabic and Persian political theater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is on the use of popular forms, particularly melodrama, as an expression of socio-political protest. The paper compares early works of Iranian constitutionalist playwrights, contemporary Egyptian dramatists, and the intellectuals of Gedikpasa Theater vis- -vis their resistance to foreign control and the dissemination of nationalistic ideology through the masses. The compared works will be put in the larger context of theatrical theory for a discussion of Persian/Arabic/Turkish exchanges.
Two other papers compare modern Lebanese and Iranian texts. The first responds to the evolution of the martyr in Arabic and Persian novels, centering on the religification of martyrdom in the contexts of the Iran-Iraq War and Lebanese Civil War. By using martyrdom as the basis of comparison, the paper highlights major overlapping trends in Lebanese and Iranian novels that reflect the changing socio-political discourse of martyrdom in those countries from the late 1970s until today.
The final paper will consider the post-war cinemas of Lebanon and Iran. Using a translocal framework, it explores the shared historical contexts and cinematic aesthetics of the postwar periods in both countries. Posing a unique understanding of the function of aesthetic manipulation in these texts, the paper argues that non-western films should be analyzed on the basis of historical context and aesthetics over national origin.
Taking its point of departure in the confluence of politics and literature, this paper examines one of the literary reflections of the declining influence of the political left and rise of Islamica-oriented discourse in the Arab East and Iran since the latter half of the 1970s. Following the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the country’s nearly decade-long war with Iraq, and throughout the 16 years of the Lebanese Civil War socio-political discourses on the idea of the martyr and the meaning of martyrdom shifted significantly, from one which once accommodated, broadly speaking, leftist political concerns, to one which had become dominated by Islamic themes. Focusing on the figure of the martyr, this paper will center on literary depictions of the evolving nature of martyrdom in the contexts of the Iran-Iraq War and the Lebanese Civil War in Arabic and Persian novels.
By identifying martyrdom as a common theme, historically, socially and politically in both Iran and Lebanon, the paper will examine how Iranian and Lebanese novelists have attempted to write out the changing dynamic of martyrdom in their literary works. Focusing primarily on the works of Rashid al-Daif and Elias Khoury in Lebanon, and Shahriar Mandanipour and Ahmad Mahmoud in Iran, the paper will compare significant overlapping trends in contemporary Arabic and Persian war novels that reflect the changing socio-political discourse of martyrdom, the martyr, and the figure of the freedom fighter in Lebanese and Iranian novels in the last three decades. Critically, the paper will also call attention to the possibilities of comparison between modern Arabic and Persian literatures on the basis of shared aesthetic responses to common political trends that have affected Iran and the Arab World in recent history, a strikingly absent approach in the studies of both modern Arabic and Persian literatures.
The writing of modern non-Western literary history has been afflicted by two reactionary theories: the first, reactionary in its Eurocentric worldview and the second, reactionary in its nativism. The first proposes that non-Western literary modernity came about solely as a result of contact with Western culture. If a classical tradition existed in the non-Western language, it is assumed to have fallen into a state of decline until Western contact through colonialism. The second theory reacts to the first by denying Western influence and positing solely pre-modern, native origins for the modern form. Lost in either approach is an appreciation of intertextuality, hybridity, and the transmission of ideas.
These two tendencies have, surprisingly, shared a commonality in their approach to the translation movement. The “traditionalists” denounce the translators as crude imitators of foreign culture, while the “modernists” celebrate the translators as enlightened thinkers who brought superior Western culture to the masses of the Third World. What these two attitudes share is the notion that these translators were simply attempting to copy an original text into their native language and in the process were “forced,” by the nature of the original text, to alter and adapt their language.
A “nahda paradigm” has been identified and discussed in the context of Arabic literary and socio-cultural modernity. The year 1798 and the French invasion of Egypt is the paradigm’s center of gravity – these become code for a series of ruptures from the past and, in the literary realm, a series of linguistic, formalistic, stylistic, and thematic transformations in literary Arabic. A similar tendency apparent in Persian literary history has so far been unnamed, and its characteristics have gone without analysis and critique. If indeed there was a Persian literary/cultural nahda, around what mystical date does it orbit?
In this paper we will first compare the prevailing views associated with the Arabic nahda paradigm and its Persian analogue, paying particular attention to the role they cast for the translation movement. We will then look at strategies employed by scholars attempting to challenge these enshrined views. A close reading of Hajji Baba of Isfahan will provide an example of how certain translations have become canonized even while their linguistic features as translated texts have been ignored and misread, and how an approach based on stylistics can provide the missing link between the modernist thesis of “Western influence” and the traditionalist thesis of autonomous literary development.
The crisis of war is a theme well manifested in the visual culture of the 1980s in Lebanon and Iran. Several studies have catalogued the mass production of this crisis in the propaganda of posters, stamps, films and other forms of material culture of war time. Zeina Maasri’s work on the political posters of the Lebanese Civil war surveys a vast array of propaganda images much in the same way that Chelkowski and Dabashi’s "Staging a Revolution" has done for the Iran-Iraq war and the Islamic Revolution. However, the images of Tehran and Beirut that emerge in the postwar period diverge a great deal from these texts most notably through cinema. Of the diverse features of the cinema of this period I consider an aesthetics that negotiates a kind of non-crisis of war with the crises of everyday life through the visions of filmmakers such as Jafar Panahi and Danielle Arbid. Adopting a translocal framework I examine Panahi’s 2003 "Crimson Gold" and Arbid’s "In the Battlefields" (2004) in order to explore the shared historical context and aesthetics of the postwar period in Lebanon and Iran. In my reading of these films I investigate the cinematic language constructed to characterize daily life and the relationship between the visual culture of the propaganda period and the cinema about and during the postwar period. Furthermore, I question the categories of second and third cinema and how understanding the function of aesthetic manipulation in these texts grants non-western films the position to be analyzed based upon historical context and aesthetic parameters over national origin.
