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The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events
Thursday, 09 February 2023, 12:00Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University
Fellow colloquium
Nojang Khatami (Justitia Centre for Advanced Studies)
»Travel and the Poetics of Dissent: Migrations of Hafez through Iran and the West«
Abstract
One of the main challenges to getting non-Western ideas right on their own terms is sufficient attention to context and the ways ideas change as they travel. This presentation considers how poetic works with political undertones can inform different kinds of resistance and world-building as they migrate geographically and temporally. It argues that acknowledging context—historical, intellectual, and cultural—is crucial for a deeper appreciation of the intentions and transformative potentialities of narratives across time and space. To make this case, I employ the example of the 14th century Sufi thinker and poet Shams ud-Dīn Muhammad Hafez, comparing uses of his ideas by Western interpreters like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson to those of political dissidents in contemporary Iran. In particular, I examine how uses of Hafez in women’s poetry circles in the Islamic Republic demonstrate tones of democratic agency that can be better grasped if they are contextualised within the worldly texts and actions from which they spring. This extension of a culturally situated and historically attuned approach, I maintain, generates better possibilities for appreciating non-Western theories according to their own self-understandings and intentions.
The speaker
Nojang Khatami received his PhD in 2021 from the University of British Columbia with a thesis on »Rewriting the People: Narrative, Exilic Thinking, and Democratic Agency beyond the West«. In 2022/23 he is, on the invitation of the Justitia Centre for Advanced Studies at Goethe University a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.
Participation and registration
Closed event. For participation on site, please register in advance (contact: Beate Sutterlüty; email: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de).
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