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Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected
everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to
marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections,
Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the
transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial
rule. Bringing into view people's lives from a city with no extant
state or civic archives, Babayan reimagines the archive of
anthologies to recover how residents shaped their communities and
crafted their urban, religious, and sexual selves. Babayan
highlights eight residents-from king to widow, painter to religious
scholar, poet to bureaucrat-who anthologized their city, writing
their engagements with friends and family, divulging the many
dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of life
in Isfahan. Through them, we see the gestures, manners, and
sensibilities of a shared culture that configured their relations
and negotiated the lines between friendship and eroticism. These
entangled acts of seeing and reading, desiring and writing converge
to fashion the refined urban self through the sensual and the
sexual-and give us a new and enticing view of the city of Isfahan.
This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the
context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium
of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean
world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies,
comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory,
diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow,
national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new
frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and
navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized
age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines
the borders of the "Armenian," pointing to a fresh vision for the
field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply
interconnected, and rich with possibility.
This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the
context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium
of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean
world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies,
comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory,
diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow,
national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new
frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and
navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized
age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines
the borders of the "Armenian," pointing to a fresh vision for the
field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply
interconnected, and rich with possibility.
"Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies
of Desire" explores different genealogies of sexuality and
questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic
assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality. Concerned
with the dynamic interplay between cultural constructions of gender
and sexuality, the anthology moves across disciplinary fields,
integrating literary criticism with social and cultural history,
and establishes a dialogue between historians (Kathryn Babayan,
Frederic Lagrange, Afsaneh Najmabadi, and Everett Rowson),
comparative literary scholars (Sahar Amer and Leyla Rouhi), and
critical theorists of sexualities (Valerie Traub, Brad Epps, and
Dina al-Kassim). As a whole, the anthology challenges Middle
Eastern Studies with questions that have arisen in recent studies
of sexualities, bringing into conversation Euro-American
scholarship of sexuality with that of scholars engaged in studies
of sexualities across a vast cultural (Iberian, Arabic, and
Iranian) and temporal field (from the tenth century to the medieval
and the modern).
Focusing on idealists and visionaries who believed that Justice
could reign in our world, this book explores the desire to
experience utopia on earth. Reluctant to await another
existence--another form, or eternal life following death and
resurrection--individuals with "ghuluww," or exaggeration, emerged
at the advent of Islam, expecting to attain the apocalyptic horizon
of Truth. In their minds, Muhammad's prophecy represented one such
cosmic moment of transformation. Even in the early modern period,
some denizens of Islamdom continued to hope for a utopia despite
aborted promises and expectations. In a moment of enthusiasm, one
group called the "Qizilbash" (Red Heads) took up arms at the turn
of the sixteenth century to fight for Shaykh Isma'il Safavi, their
divinely inspired leader. The Safavis succeeded in establishing an
empire, but their revolutionary sensibilities were exposed to
erasures and expulsion into the realms of heresy. The social
settings in which such beliefs were performed in early modern Iran
are highlighted in order to tease out the relationship between
discourse and practice, narrating the ways in which a Persianate
ethos uncovered new Islamic identities (Alid and Sufi). "Mystics,
Monarchs and Messiah" explores these belief systems within a
dialogue between Semitic, Indo-Iranian, and Hellenic cultures that
continued to resist the monotheist impulse to delay the meeting of
the holy with the human until the end of time.
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