The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events
Thursday, 09 February 2023, 12:00
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Am Wingertsberg 4, 61348 Bad Homburg
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe UniversityFellow 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).
In order to provide you with the best online experience this website uses cookies. Delete cookies
By using our website, you agree to the data protection declaration and to the use of cookies.
Learn more
I agree
Cookies are short reports that are sent and stored on the hard drive of the user's computer through your browser when it connects to a web. Cookies can be used to collect and store user data while connected to provide you the requested services and sometimes tend not to keep. Cookies can be themselves or others.
There are several types of cookies:
- Technical cookies that facilitate user navigation and use of the various options or services offered by the web as identify the session, allow access to certain areas, facilitate orders, purchases, filling out forms, registration, security, facilitating functionalities (videos, social networks, etc..).
- Customization cookies that allow users to access services according to their preferences (language, browser, configuration, etc..).
- Analytical cookies which allow anonymous analysis of the behavior of web users and allow to measure user activity and develop navigation profiles in order to improve the websites.
So when you access our website, in compliance with Article 22 of Law 34/2002 of the Information Society Services, in the analytical cookies treatment, we have requested your consent to their use. All of this is to improve our services. We use Google Analytics to collect anonymous statistical information such as the number of visitors to our site. Cookies added by Google Analytics are governed by the privacy policies of Google Analytics. If you want you can disable cookies from Google Analytics.
However, please note that you can enable or disable cookies by following the instructions of your browser.