Translating the Self: Language and Identity in Iranian-American Women's Memoirs

In recent years, a number of Iranian American women have written and published memoirs of a return to Iran. One motif that these memoirs share is their concern with language as a key element of cultural identity. The article examines these memoirs as negotiations of identity through language. Relying on Joshua Fishman's anthropological definition of language and ethnicity as being, doing, and knowing, and on Taghi Modarressi's notion of “accented writing,” this article examines these writers in terms of their relationship to Persian as a key component of the self. As these memoirists narrate their journeys between Iran and the United States, they perform a translation of self across the boundaries of language. Some narrate an “accented identity” that celebrates hybridity; others acknowledge their assimilation into American society and into the English language. All attempt to reclaim Persian as an artifact, if not a medium of cultural belonging.     

Writing the History of the “Persian Arabs”: The Pre-Islamic Perspective on the “Naṣrids” of al-Ḥīrah

Modern scholarship on Arabs in the pre-Islamic period has focused on Rome's Arab allies—the so-called “Jafnids” or “Ghassānids,” with much less attention paid to Persia's Arab allies, the so-called “Na?rid” or “Lakhmid” dynasty of Arab leaders at al-?īrah in Iraq. This article examines select pre-Islamic sources for the Persian Arabs, showing that even with the meager evidence available to us, and the lack of archaeological material, it is possible to draw a relatively complex portrait of the Persian Arabs. This article situates the Persian Arabs as important figures in some key themes and phenomena of late antiquity, such as the growth of Christian communities, the conflict between Rome and Persia, and the struggle for influence in the Arabian peninsula.     

The “Metal Army” of Alexander in the War against the Indian King Porus in Three Persian Alexander Books (Tenth‒Fourteenth Centuries)

The article focuses on a very particular episode of the eastern Alexander legend, i.e. the building of an extraordinary “metal army” employed by Alexander in his war against the Indian King Porus, which is present in at least three Persian accounts written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries CE: the “Book of Kings” (Shāh-nāmeh) by Ferdowsi, the “Book of Dārāb” (Dārāb-nāmeh), attributed to Tarsusi, and an “Alexander-book” (Eskandar-nāmeh) in prose copied by ?Abd al-Kāfi ibn Abu al-Barakāt. Compared to the most remote source, the text of Pseudo-Callisthenes, and to the closest ones (the Armenian version of the fifth century, the Syriac text of the sixth?seventh centuries, and the Hebrew version of the tenth?eleventh centuries), it is argued that the Persian authors have not passively received the inherited materials; on the contrary, they have been able to liven up the scene of Alexander’s battle against the Indian King Porus by bringing onto the battlefield a fiery and phantasmagorical army of metal, giving us one of the more amazing episodes in the eastern legend of the great Macedonian.     

The Unfolding of Unreason: Javad Tabatabai's Idea of Political Decline in Iran

Javad Tabatabai, a leading theorist and historian of political thought in Iran, has presented a controversial theory regarding the causes of the decline of political thought and society in Iran over the last few centuries. His ideas on Iranian decline have affected the intellectual debates on modernity and democracy currently underway in Iran. Tabatabai's career-long research has revolved around this question: “What conditions made modernity possible in Europe and led to its abnegation in Iran?” He answers this question by adopting a “Hegelian approach” that privileges a philosophical reading of history on the assumption that philosophical thought is the foundation and essence of any political community and the basis for any critical analysis of it as well. This article critically engages with Tabatabai's ideas of “crisis,” and “decline” by challenging his exposition of the Persian tradition.     

Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization

Abstract: When US military commanders refer today to the “long war”, they could more instructively refer to the “long war of securitization”, involving both practices of war and reconstruction that have always been based on a therapeutic logic of preemption and an endgame of protection from global economic risk. Since the early 1980s, the centrepiece of US foreign policy has been the securitization of the Persian Gulf region, with the newly created United States Central Command (CENTCOM) given the task of effecting a grand strategy that has subsequently been consistently based on two interrelated tactics: first, the discursive identification and positing of the Persian Gulf as a precarious yet pivotal geoeconomic space, essential to US and global economic health; and second, the enactment of a dual military–economic securitization strategy to secure, patrol and regulate designated “vital interests” in the region. With the rhetorical power of “risk management” perhaps more palpable today than ever, this paper reflects on the neoliberal discourses of “risk” and “regulation” that sustain a “long war” in which the perennial potentiality of a volatile global political economy necessitates securitization by US military force.     

What about Translation? Beyond “Persianization” as the Language Policy in Iran

Against the background of language policy research on Iran, and drawing on insights from recent scholarship on the role of translation in language policy, this article calls into question the claim that “Persianization” of non-Persian peoples is the main element of language policy in Iran. In so doing, the article examines closely the role of translation as enacted in two legal instruments: the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Law of Parliamentary Elections. The study illustrates that although official communication between Iranian authorities and citizens is a prototypical example of monolingualism and non-translation, voluntary translation happens between Persian and non-Persian speaking individuals, acting as a viable and cost-effective bottom-up alternative for the inclusion of non-Persian speaking peoples, far more effective than an impractical, top-down language policy reform implicitly found in the “Persianization” claim.     

The “Bad” French of Justin Trudeau: When Language,Ideology, and Politics Collide

This article discusses the ideological underpinnings and sociolinguistic factors driving the pervasive negative social discourse on the quality of the French language spoken by Canada’s current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The “obsession” among Québécois with the quality of Justin Trudeau’s French is demonstrated in an analysis of a corpus of commentary generated in Quebec’s mainstream press during the period surrounding the 2015 Canadian federal election. This intensely negative metadiscourse is shown to be rooted in the context of Quebec’s difficult sociolinguistic history and its contemporary language ideologies, viewed here as biased in favor of speakers with monolingual competence and French-Canadian ancestry. Crucially, the pervasive criticism of Justin Trudeau’s French and the ensuing denial to him of Francophone status are claimed here to serve as a proxy for extra-linguistic criticism and the positioning him as “other” with respect to Québécois collective identity.     

The Rose and the Wine: Dispute as a Literary Device in Classical Persian Literature

As everyone knows, alcoholic drinks, including wine, are forbidden by Islam. Readers of Persian poetry often wonder how is it possible that Persian wine literature is one of the richest in the world and whether the poets and authors ever address the illicitness of the wine in their works. This article examines how one author, Zangī Bukhārī, presents a catalogue of positive and negative qualities of wine in his Gul u mul (“The Rose and the Wine”). Through the genre of debate (munāzara), he shows how a courtly audience may have tried to justify the drinking of wine. The article examines the formal generic characteristics of such debates, showing how the form of the debate is rather appropriate to let forbidden objects or ideas, in this case the wine, speak for themselves thus defending their position in an Islamic society. entertaining in is richness in metaphors and imagery used by the wine and the rose to voice their superiority to each other, but it also addresses a rather controversial topic in an uncontroversial style.     

Sanctioned Heterodoxy: Local Cults in Two Chinese Catholic Villages, 1900-Present

While ecclesiastic and state authorities in Europe largely abolished medieval cults of saints because of their “heterodoxy,” late-imperial and modern Chinese Catholic communities in Shanxi still promulgate local cults dedicated to women and men who are believed to have performed posthumous miracles or who represent heroic virtue. Although constrained beneath the scrutiny of imperial, ecclesial, and modern political ideas of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” two Shanxi Catholic villages, Dongergou and Liangquandao (Liuhecun), have managed to preserve and promote Sister Maria Assunta Pallotta and Father Wang Shiwei as contemporary versions of traditional local cults. One of the manifest characteristics of these two Chinese Catholic local cults is how they have been transformed by traditional Daoist cults and have successfully survived in a liminal space between “orthodox” and “heterodox.” Relying on archival materials from the former Taiyuan Catholic Diocese Archive, records held in Roman archives, and oral testimonies, intricate patterns of accommodation and resistance to political and church authorities can be discerned as means for these remote Catholic villages to construct identity and cultivate social cohesion.     

Chokepoint: Regulating US student mobility through biometrics

Many US public schools, struggling with perceived issues of safety and security, have installed a host of different biometric devices – vein scanners, automated fingerprint identification systems, iris scanners, GPS-enabled identification badges, and facial recognition software. Schools turn to these devices in hopes of securing school space by sorting and tracking students, visitors, and school staff based on their pre-determined risk profiles. As such, this article proposes that tracing these new forms of school security provides insight into how the politics and practices of biometric technologies are fundamentally geographical in nature. That is, biometric devices not only verify identity according to risk assessments, they also work to manage mobility by regulating where school bodies can go, when, and for what purposes. Moreover, this article analyzes how these risk profiling tactics, widely adopted by schools across the United States, necessarily borrow from the strategies used in sites of colonial occupation. Looking at schools in this way can help us plot how biometric bordering and resultant security decisions unfold at other sites of mobility beyond state (smart) borders, highways, toll booths, and ports of entry in order to formulate new “spaces of enclosure” (Amoore, Marmura, & Salter, 2008) and “dividing practices” (Nevins, 2002), thus bringing students into “closer proximity” to military relations of force through these “war-like architectures” (Amoore, 2009).     

Abducted Wives: A Hellenistic Narrative in Judges 21?

the author suggests the possibility that Judges 13-16, 17-21, and 2 Samuel 21-23 may have been added to the Deuteronomistic History in the late Persian or Hellenistic period, for this literature shows continuity with Greek literature. In particular, the author traces the similarities between the biblical account of the “Abduction at Shiloh” in Judges 21 with the account of the “Rape of the Sabine Women” found in Livy and Plutarch. Though the biblical author lived before these classical authors, the biblical author may have known an earlier version of the tale, as demonstrated by at least twelve plot similarities between the narratives.     

The Darwinian Rhetoric of Science in Petr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution (1902)

The paper explores the significance of rhetorical argumentation in Petr Kropotkin's treatise Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution (1902). It argues that Kropotkin's work is steeped in the tradition of a rhetoric of science that is profoundly Darwinian and in which various forms of analogic reasoning play a central role. After explaining the epistemic function of the metaphors “struggle for existence” and “mutual aid,” the paper analyses Kropotkin's argumentation strategies and offers an interpretation of them as a further development and reworking of Darwinian rhetoric.     

3. SIMA QIAN AND HIS WESTERN COLLEAGUES: ON POSSIBLE CATEGORIES OF DESCRIPTION

This article comments on some of Professor Huang's theses by looking at ancient historiography. It deals with the significance of history in its respective cultural contexts; the kind of orientation that historical thinking and historiography provide; and the relationship between concrete examples and abstract rules in historical argumentation. Distinguishing between ancient Greece and Rome, it shows that Huang's explicit and implicit East‐West oppositions are more valid with respect to ancient Greece than to ancient Rome. on important points, the situation of Rome is surprisingly close to that of china. thus not only in China but also in Rome, tradition and history are highly important as a life‐orienting force (as opposed to the importance of speculative thought in Greece); and not only in China but also in Rome the orientation that historical thinking and historiography provide is to a great extent moral (as opposed to orientation through intellectual insight that, for a historian such as Thucydides, is placed in the foreground). As to the relationship between concrete examples and abstract rules in historical argumentation, the paper takes up Professor Rüsen's category of “exemplary meaning‐generation,” but suggests a distinction between example in the sense of “case/instance” and example in the sense of “model/paragon.” Though the two corresponding modes of exemplary meaning‐generation are mostly entwined, it appears that in Chinese and Roman historical works (in accordance with their stress on moral effect) there is a tendency toward meaning‐generation by example in the sense of “model/paragon,” whereas in Greek historiography (in accordance with its stress on intellectual insight) the tendency is toward meaning‐generation by example in the sense of “case/instance.”     

DOES HISTORY MATTER? CHARLES TAYLOR ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL VALIDITY OF SOCIAL IMAGINARIES

Since its appearance in 2007, Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has received much attention. One of the central issues in the discussions around Taylor's book is the role of history in philosophical argumentation, in particular with regard to normative positions on ultimate affairs. Many critics observe a methodological flaw in using history in philosophical argumentation in that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor's historical approach, on the one hand, and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence, on the other. Since his “faith‐based history” is unwittingly apologetic, it is not only “hard to judge in strictly historical terms,” but it also proves that “when it comes to the most ultimate affairs history may not matter at all.” This paper challenges this verdict by exposing the misunderstanding underlying this interpretation of the role of history in Taylor's narrative. In order to disambiguate the relation between history and philosophy in Taylor's approach, I will raise three questions. First, what is the precise relation between history and ontology, taking into account the ontological validity of what Taylor calls social imaginaries? Second, why does “fullness” get a universal status in his historical narrative? Third, is Taylor's position tenable that the contemporary experience of living within “an immanent frame” allows for an openness to transcendence? In order to answer these questions, I will first compare Peter Gordon's interpretation of the status of social imaginaries with Taylor's position and, on the basis of that comparison, distinguish two definitions of ontology (sections I and II). Subsequently, I try to make it clear that precisely Taylor's emphasis on the historical character of social imaginaries and on their “relaxed” ontological anchorage allows for his claim that “fullness” might have a trans‐historical character (section III). Finally, I would like to show that Taylor's defense of the possibility of an “openness to transcendence”—as a specific mode of fullness—is not couched in “onto‐theological” terms, as suggested by his critics, but that it is the very outcome of taking into account the current historical situation (section IV).     

“Killing time” in rural Ireland,c.1881–2013

This article explores the way in which episodes that took place during the “long” land war of 1879–1909 have been remembered or forgotten in Craughwell, Co. Galway, between 1881 and 2013. By exploring those episodes and individuals that are remembered locally in monuments, published oral histories and in oral histories conducted by the author, this article explores the complex patterns of remembering in rural Irish communities. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this study for how we interpret oral histories, and on how a culture of remembering and not remembering might have affected twentieth-century Irish society.     

Recently discovered early Christian monuments in Northeastern Arabia

This article is written from first-hand observation, albeit without the benefit of any controlled excavation. It is a “tourist observation.” It is offered to alert the archaeological community to a series of discoveries of singular importance in the history of the Persian Gulf, namely the discovery beneath the sands of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia of a Christian church predating (and postdating?) the appearance of Islam and the identification of two other nearby Christian sites.     

Providing local color?: "cape coloreds," "cockneys," and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s

Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged “individual characteristics” that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city’s distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its “local colour”: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of “others”. In Cape Town, depictions of “Coloured” inhabitants as unique “city types” became part of the city’s “destination branding”. The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s “Cockneys” and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical “place-selling”.     

Persianisms: The Achaemenid Court in Greek Art, 380–330 BCE

The Persians held sway over the Greek imagination for more than 200 years. The image of Persia shifted in that time from xenophobic hostility, caused through fear of the encroaching presence of the Persian empire, through to curious acceptance of its dominance. Much study has been given to the formative decades of the construction of the Persian “Other” in Greek art, but the fourth-century image of Persia has remained relatively unexplored. This paper demonstrates how Greek artists of the period 380–330 BCE fixated on the life and accomplishments of the court of the Achaemenid Great Kings and argues that instead of offering an orientalist clichéd view of Persian life, it attempted to understand and disseminate bone fide Iranian images of court society.