The Kamran Djam Annual LectureCentre for Iranian Studies, SOAS

The Exilic Mode in Persian Literature

Inaugural Lectures by

Professor Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak

University of Maryland

Monday, 25th and Tuesday, 26th June 2012

The Kamran Djam Annual LectureIn 2011 SOAS was awarded a gift of £2 million by the Fereydoun Djam Charitable Trust to promote Iranian studies. This generous endowment enables SOAS to build on its long and disti nguished traditi on of study into one of the world’s oldest and richest cultures. As part of this initi ati ve, SOAS has introduced new scholarships in Iranian studies as well as an annual lecture series to promote diverse aspects of Iranian studies. The annual lectures are hosted by the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS and are named aft er Fereydoun’s son, Kamran Djam, who predeceased his parents in 1989.We are delighted to inaugurate the series this year with two lectures by Professor Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, an internati onally renowned and disti nguished fi gure in Iranian studies.

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Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is Professor of Persian Language, Literature, and Cultures at the University of Maryland and Founding Director of the University’s Roshan Center for Persian Studies. He has studied in Iran and the United States, receiving his Ph.D. in comparati ve literature from Rutgers University in 1979. Karimi-Hakkak is the author, editor or translator of over twenty books and around one hundred and fi ft y research arti cles. The study of languages, literatures and cultures in their various socio-politi cal contexts and along the historical line has been at the centre of his scholarship. He counts Recasti ng Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poeti c Modernity in Iran (University of Utah Press, 1995), Essays on Nima Yushij: Animati ng Modernity in Persian Poetry (Brill, 2004), and Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (Arcade, 2005) as most representati ve of his contributi ons to the study of Persian literature in Iran. As a public intellectual Karimi has writt en extensively and lectures frequently on a wide range of scholarly and academic topics, such as the internati onal and transnati onal dimensions of Persian literature and Iranian culture in the Islamic era and on the cultures of the Middle East and the Muslim world in general. He has writt en entries on Iran and Persian literature and many of the topics menti oned above for various reference works including The Encyclopedia Britannica, The Encyclopaedia Iranica, and The Encyclopedia of Translati on Studies. Karimi-Hakkak’s works have been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, and Persian. He has won numerous professional awards and honours, and has served as President of the Internati onal Society for Iranian Studies and several other professional academic organizati ons.

Lecture One: The Classical BackgroundExile is a fundamentally disjuncti ve experience, causing disrupti ons in the mind, creati ng tensions between individuals and their environments, and nurturing desires and dreams that are at once impossible and essenti al. The response to the experience, predictably aimed at restoring wholeness and healing, can take the shape of radical mental adjustments or constant negoti ati ons between exiles and the environments they fi nd themselves in. The range of exilic experiences and responses recorded in Persian poetry and prose in over a thousand years of arti sti c expression is vast indeed. In the fi rst talk we will survey the exilic mode in classical Persian literature from its beginning in tenth century Central Asia to the waning of the classical traditi on and the dawning of the modern period around the turn of the twenti eth century. We will thus follow the vicissitudes of this themati c strand through the lyrical and dramati c poetry of the eleventh and twelft h centuries, through the emergence and evoluti on of the mysti cal discourse in Persian literature to the threshold of modernity when the contours of the modern country of Iran as we know it today begin to emerge. Poems by such early poets like Sa`d Salman of Lahore and Nasser Khosrow of Qobadian, as well as later poets like Rumi, Hafez, Kamal and others will provide ample ground for our explorati on.

Lecture Two: The Modern and Contemporary ScenesThe second talk will address the exilic mode in modern and contemporary poetry and prose of Iran, primarily in the twenti eth and twenty-fi rst centuries, with special emphasis on the last three decades. As a central cultural arti fact of Iranian patrioti c nati onalism rising against an essenti ally transnati onal historical backdrop, modern and modernist Persian literature produced in Iran and by expatriate Iranians refl ects a history of love-and-hate relati onship between the individual consciousness and the environment in which it fi nds itself. As such, a detailed examinati on of the desire to be liberated from the sti fl ing atmosphere of the homeland, on the one hand, and expatriate Iranians’ desire to return home, on the other, parti cularly observable in the literature of the late twenti eth and early twenty-fi rst centuries, reveals the interplay of memory and imaginati on, backward and forward glances, and various feelings of nostalgia at work. The talk will examine the topoi related to dreams of return and restorati on in the works of such literary fi gures as Gholamhossein Saedi, Nader Naderpur, Shahrokh Meskub, Yadolah Royai, Esmail Khoi and Reza Ghasemi, among others. In thus surveying the principal currents in contemporary writi ng by Iranian expatriates, we will be placing the literature of Iranian exile in relati on to the canons of Persian literature, both classical and modern.

The Exilic Mode in Persian Literature

Cover image from Ten Poems from Hafez. www.jilapeacock.co.uk

The Kamran Djam Annual LectureCentre for Iranian Studies, SOAS

Date & Time

First Lecture: Monday, 25th June 2012

6.00pm followed by a reception at 7.30pm

Second Lecture: Tuesday, 26th June 2012

6.00pm – 7.30pm

Venue

Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre

School of Oriental and African Studies

Russell Square

London WC1H 0XG

Admission

Admission Free - All Welcome

Organised by

Centre for Iranian Studies, SOAS

Enquiries

T: 020 7898 4330

E: vp6@soas.ac.uk

W: www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cis/events/