Afterword to Persianate Pasts, National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century

What is the relevance of the Persianate as a category of analysis in a world wherein even world literature continues to be framed as the literary history of discrete nations? First coined by historian Marshall Hodgson in 1974, Persianate initially referred to cultures such as Georgian, Armenian, Chaghatay, Urdu, and Ottoman, which were heavily influenced lexically and culturally by Persian without themselves being related to Persian linguistically. Gradually, an additional meaning was grafted onto “Persianate,” which referenced cultures such as Judeo-Persian that were linguistically Persian but culturally diverse, bearing multiple alphabets, religions, and identities. These two meanings—the first grounded in cultural affinity and the second in linguistic origins—complement each other and ensure that the concept of the Persianate is reducible neither to language nor to identity.