Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene by Hamid Dabashi (review)

Persophilia: it is this compelling title that heralds scholar Hamid Dabashi's latest work, and perhaps his most striking contribution to postcolonial, comparative, literary, and Persian studies. Offering his readers new insight into the way Europeans conceived of and shaped representations of Persian literature, culture, and aesthetics, Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, provides us with a Persian counterpart to Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Not only does Dabashi sketch out the various ways in which Europeans have attempted to represent Persia, but he also traces the ways in which Persianate cultures have been affected by these attempts of representation. Building upon the theories of Edward Said, Raymond Schwab, and Jürgen Habermas, Dabashi employs a comparative, critical approach to directly assess what would have been formerly considered an orientalist preoccupation with all things Persian. Just as Said's Orientalism was groundbreaking for contemporary Middle Eastern cultural studies, so is Dabashi's twelve-chapter study similarly innovative for Persian studies, as it cleverly resurrects Persophilia not only as a designation, but as a diagnosis for Europeans who are obsessed and fascinated with representing Persia.

Dabashi begins his discussion by investigating the epistemologies, attitudes, and movements of European and American Persophiles preoccupied with Persia and its peoples. Not only concerned with Euro-American motivations for carrying out such projects, Dabashi is also invested in tracing the legacy of imperial Persophilia on contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. In his text, the author strives to "focus on the consequences for Iranians of this European (and therefore global) interest, in the form of a potent case study that inquires what happened when people on the colonial side of the imperial divide saw themselves in these European mirrors?" (Dabashi 4). What ensues is a project that evaluates European representations of Persia and the self-fashioning of Iranians, who look at themselves through the prism of European primacy. Indeed, these infinity mirrors reflecting Persian and European dynamics illuminate how European perceptions of the Persian court spilled into the competing public spaces of European intellectualism and Persian nationalism.

By critically engaging Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Discovery of India and the East: 1680-1880 along with Said's works, Dabashi points out that European Orientalism did not remain in Europe, but travelled to Iran to take on a new form. In doing so, Dabashi borrows the notion of "travelling" from Said and fills in gaps left behind by both Said and Schwab, who primarily focus on Eurocentric formulations of the Orient, and thus ignore the ways in which those notions resurfaced in those imagined spaces, building into replicated discourses and anticolonial rhetoric at the site of the European representation: Persia. Persian studies scholars will find this an interesting argument and echo of Jalal al-e Ahmad's Gharbzadegi/West Strickenness (1962), which critiqued Iranians for their superficial fascination with Western culture and adoption of cultural modes for expression. In their reverence, some Persians narcissistically enjoyed the images that the West created, which al-e Ahmad warned would result in a loss of Persian cultural codes, customs, values, and aesthetics (Dabashi 22-23). For postcolonial scholars, Dabashi's discussion and use of Schwab and Said point out how fascination with Persia left a space for the "west" to colonize, control, orientalize, and geopolitically cannibalize the "east," despite fearing literal cannibalization during the colonial encounter.

At the heart of Dabashi's evaluation is an interest in the ensuing conceptions of homeland by Persians who are ironically afflicted with European Persophilia. While Dabashi offers numerous examples of Persophilia and explores how scholars engaged with the phenomenon, he also focuses on its (un)intended consequences for Persian civil identity in the public sphere. As Dabashi notes, "I am interested in Persian cultural heritage and what happens to it when, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and under the influence of European imperial encroachment, it finally exited the Persianate court and emerged to form a...