DISENTANGLING PERSIANATE SELFHOOD FROM METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM

Abstract

From the twelfth to the nineteenth century, Persian was used as the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia. Mana Kia's Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism, a searching account of selfhood across this vast region, is novel in its use of Derridean deconstruction to distill shared forms of belonging and affiliation during the political disarray of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kia is part of a growing and important chorus of scholars who are questioning primordialist conceptualizations of identity by challenging widely held assumptions that Persian is a language that has always belonged to Iran or that its use in India was a foreign import, out of place and unnatural. More broadly, Kia's work holds a mirror up to historians of precolonial contexts, encouraging us to think more carefully about the fundamental conceptual and descriptive language that we use to describe how people inhabited those worlds.