After Adab: Loss and Linguistic Re-Imagination in the Postcolonial Present
Description
In premodern times, linguistic multiplicity was integral to cosmopolitan life. The 13th-century Sufi poet Amir Khusro exemplified this ethos, as he seamlessly composed in Persian, Hindavi, Arabic, and Turkish—thus inhabiting a multiverse of languages that enabled plural forms of thought and expression.
Modernity, however, introduced a new relationship to language. Colonial and modern philologists began ranking languages through hierarchical frameworks and often privileged certain tongues as intellectually or morally superior (Masuzawa 2012). This shift helped justify racialized and class-based distinctions and contributed to what has been termed linguistic apartheid. In today’s neoliberal order, language is increasingly valued for its instrumental function—its capacity to produce, manage, and govern—rather than its ethical or imaginative possibilities.
This transformation has had profound cultural consequences. For instance, Persian, once central to cultivating adab—a sensibility of refinement and ethical conduct—among Indian Muslims (Kia 2020), has been relegated to the margins, and has come to be increasingly associated with sectarian identity rather than shared literary heritage. Such changes reflect a global trend in which nationalism has redefined language as a marker of difference rather than a medium of connection.
This panel invites reflections on the linguistic re-imagination in the modern post-colonial nation states that employ literary, philosophical, historical, and comparative approaches, as well as close readings of specific writers and movements. How have multilingual traditions historically shaped alternative ways of dwelling in the world and how are they being reclaimed? What kinds of ethical, spiritual, or aesthetic visions continue to emerge from these linguistic multiverses—and how do they challenge the dominance of monolingual ideologies and the nation-state’s “linguistic intransigence”? We welcome work on literary traditions in Middle Eastern, African, Central and South Asian, and European languages.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Zakir Hussein Gul is a PhD student at Harvard’s NELC. He studied Arabic & Islamic Studies at Oxford, Persian Literature at the University of Tehran, & Turkish at Ankara University (TÖMER). His research examines questions of mimesis & imitation in early modern Indo-Persian & Ottoman literature. Zakir has contributed to such debates through a number of peer-reviewed publications & a critical edition of one such Ottoman emulation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān, forthcoming with Mīrās̱-i Maktūb.
Speaker Bio
Maisam is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at the University of California, Riverside. His research lies on the intersection of philosophical and spiritual poetics, with a focus on notions such as mimēsis, askēsis, and theosis within classical Greek, Arab-Islamic, and Persian traditions.
Speaker Bio
Taimoor Shahid is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with OpenITI and a multilingual scholar working with Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, & other South Asian languages. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago with a dissertation examining Saif al-Mulūk across the Indian Ocean World. His book-length works include The Madness of Waiting and The Dangerous Man, and his research on Islamic ethics and Sufi thought has been supported by Fulbright, AIPS, AIIS, Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and ACLS.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Alexander Jabbari is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He works on the literatures, history, and philology of the Middle East and South Asia. His first book, The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Noman Baig is an Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities at Habib University, Pakistan.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Hamza Iqbal is currently serving as an Assistant Teaching Professor and Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University. His areas of interests and research are Urdu lyric poetry (ghazal), Philosophical Aesthetics, and Critical Theory. He finished his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023 and has published in The Journal of Urdu Studies.
Speaker Bio
Monica Katiboğlu is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey. Her research focuses on Ottoman and Turkish literature in comparative and translingual contexts, with particular attention to the politics of language, translation, and modernity. She is currently completing a book on Edebiyat-ı Cedide (“New Literature”), examining their translingual practice as shaped by hauntings.