Reversing the Colonial Gaze Persian Travelers Abroad The Global Middle East Series

Exploring the furthest reaches of the globe, Persian travelers from Iran and India travelled across Russian and Ottoman territories, to Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe and beyond. Remapping the world through their travelogues, Reversing the Colonial Gaze offers a comprehensive and transformative analysis of the journeys of over a dozen of these nineteenth-century Persian travelers. By moving beyond the dominant Eurocentric perspectives on travel narratives, Hamid Dabashi works to reverse the colonial gaze which has thus far been cast upon these rich body of travelogues. His lyrical and engaging re-evaluation of these journeys, complimented by close-readings of seminal travelogues, challenges the systematic neglect of these narratives in scholarly literature. Opening up the entirety of these overlooked or abused travelogues, Dabashi reveals not a mere repetition of cliché accounts of Iranian or Muslim encounters with the West, but a path-breaking introduction to a constellation of revelatory travel narratives that re-imagine and reclaim the world beyond colonial borders.

1. Mr Shushtari travels to India; 2. Mirza Abu Taleb travels from India; 3. An Ilchi wonders about the world; 4. A colonial officer is turned upside down; 5. A Shirazi shares his travelogues; 6. A wandering monarch; 7. Hajj Sayyah leads a peripatetic life; 8. In the company of a refined prince; 9. A wandering mystic; 10. In and out of a homeland; 11. The fact and fiction of a homeland; 12. Professor Sayyah comes home to teach.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent including Iran: A People Interrupted (2007), Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest (2011), The World of Persia Literary Humanism (2012), Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (2015), Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation (2016) and The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature (2019).