Universität zu Köln

Allahverdi, Amir (2022). Persia in the Trans-Atlantic Context: From Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Literature to American Transcendental Embrace. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

Persia in the Trans-Atlantic Context: From Nineteenth-Century British Imperial Literature to American Transcendental Embrace principally explores the battle over the “discursive formation” of Persia in the nineteenth century within a primarily intra-European “discourse,” first with an overt emphasis on English works, and then from a trans-Atlantic perspective. This dissertation offers an analysis of the pivotal The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and tries to demonstrate how the emergence of this book in the Imperial Century introduced a novel and politically-charged image of the Qajar Persia, altering the aesthetic, historical, literary, mystical and generally civilizational perceptions of Persia that dominated the Western “discursive” reservoir during the previous centuries. Contextualizing this work and many other secondary sources within the very elaborate networks of imperial strife, intrigues and alliances, I argue that the entity of Persia does not emerge as homogenously as expected, while certain modes of “dis-course” within the intra-European setting inhibits the realization of the British imperial “discursive” policy vis-à-vis the dwindling Imperial State of Iran. I then show how these alternative “discourses,” with their deep roots in Germanophone intellectual circles, try to challenge and decenter the “discourse” that emerged from the British imperial enterprise with regard to the Sublime State of Persia, as its geo-political “Other.” I will then show how this sympathetic mode of German “Orientalism,” together with the British imperial “Orientalism,” trickled across to the other side of the Atlantic and paved the way for the same battle in the New World over the same entity. I contend that the aesthetically and philosophically-charged modes of “discourse,” however, could find a more fertile ground in the nineteenth-century New World, where, for instance, a figure like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the distinguished transcendentalist philosopher and poet, tried to introduce and appropriate many tenets of pre-Islamic and Islamic Persia for his own intellectual purposes. This has been shown through a close reading of Emerson’s “Oriental” endeavors.