Discussion seminar with Mana Kia (Columbia University)
THE OLD WOMEN OF NISHAPUR INITIATIVE: GENDER, KNOWLEDGE, RELIGION
FALL 2024
Professor Mana Kia is scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas between South and West Asia from the 17-19th centuries. She has a particular interest in hermeneutical horizons and meaning worlds Indo-Persian literary culture and social history. Her work is transregional, straddling Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, and interdisciplinary, drawing on sources and approaches of history, literature, and historical anthropology. Among her many publications, she is the author of Persianate Selves (2020). She is Associate Professor of at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University.
Together with Mana Kia we will discuss passages from AUSTRALIANAMA by Samia Khatun.
Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.
If you are interested in attending, email setrag.manoukian [at] mcgill.ca to receive the reading selection.
Do not miss MANA KIA’s talk on Tuesday November 5 at 4pm (Morrice Hall 328): Re-Personalizing the State: Persianate Sociability as Political Ethic