What do you think?
Rate this book
Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism
For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation.
Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.
Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published May 19, 2020
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 11, 2021
Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism by Mana Kia, asks a very simple question, when pre-moderns thought about the idea of being part of Persian civilization, what did they mean by it?
Trying to understand what Persian-ness might be before the 18th century is complicated by the fact we live in an era of territorial nationalism, thus when we look back at the past, we look for things that resemble the realities of our world and this can distort our abilities to comprehend past societies.
Mana Kia confronts this problem head-on and aims to tell a history of Persian-ness, which encompasses present-day Iran, Iraq, India and other places, “To remove Persianate culture from the shadow of nationalism, we need to disaggregate the Persianate from Iran.” The book that follows is a tale of complexity, contradiction, multiplicity and constantly shifting ideas about the self, belonging and civilisational heritage. Persianate does not refer to a specific time, land or origin, but to ever-changing times, places and origins.
The idea of Persian culture in the premodern period encompassed a shared language, shared morality, social etiquette and aesthetic concerns known as adab, literature and education, which was transregional from the Middle East to South and Central Asia all part and parcel of Islam.
Indeed Islam and Persian culture are intertwined with one another and the expansion of one often meant the expansion of the other. This is a very different way of thinking about the Persianate from some modern scholars and nationalists, who tend to see Persia as this timeless thing centred in present-day Iran, which is held together by a group of people who share the same ethnicity, culture, heritage, blood and language, who are also very distinct from Arabs and reluctantly converted to Islam.
Kia argues most of this is a recent myth, some contemporary scholarship has explored the invention of Iranian nationalism, however, as Persianate Selves shows, these works still suffer from similar problems to the myths they are deconstructing, which is a tendency to privilege the history of Persia as squarely within or centred on modern Iran itself. “Before nationalism, Persianate selves could hail from many places, and their origins comprised a variety of lineages. The interrelations among these lineages render coherent their multiple modes of imagination, practice, and experience.”
TRENDING NOW
Qatar World Cup
Iran
Palestine
Israel
Breadcrumb
Features Book Club
Persianate Selves: Fostering a convivial identity from regional traditions
Book Club
5 min read
Usman Butt
27 October, 2021
Veering away from traditional conceptualisations of what constitutes Persian culture, Mana Kia's latest book looks at how ambiguous, often fluid and varied networks combined to shape 'Persian-ness' and how this shifts our understanding of identity.
Share
Flipboard
Reddit
WhatsApp
Twitter
Facebook
Persianate Selves - Book Review
Recent studies of pre-modern Persia have largely failed to account for the ambiguity of relations and networks within the region [Stanford University Press]
Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism by Mana Kia, asks a very simple question, when pre-moderns thought about the idea of being part of Persian civilization, what did they mean by it?
Trying to understand what Persian-ness might be before the 18th century is complicated by the fact we live in an era of territorial nationalism, thus when we look back at the past, we look for things that resemble the realities of our world and this can distort our abilities to comprehend past societies.
Mana Kia confronts this problem head-on and aims to tell a history of Persian-ness, which encompasses present-day Iran, Iraq, India and other places, “To remove Persianate culture from the shadow of nationalism, we need to disaggregate the Persianate from Iran.” The book that follows is a tale of complexity, contradiction, multiplicity and constantly shifting ideas about the self, belonging and civilisational heritage. Persianate does not refer to a specific time, land or origin, but to ever-changing times, places and origins.
"An inescapable conclusion of the Persianate Selves is not the utopia of the past but the messiness of it, it moves the discussion beyond certain reductive categories and expands our possibilities for being and becoming for no historical work is purely a study of the past, but also very much part of the present"
The idea of Persian culture in the premodern period encompassed a shared language, shared morality, social etiquette and aesthetic concerns known as adab, literature and education, which was transregional from the Middle East to South and Central Asia all part and parcel of Islam.
Indeed Islam and Persian culture are intertwined with one another and the expansion of one often meant the expansion of the other. This is a very different way of thinking about the Persianate from some modern scholars and nationalists, who tend to see Persia as this timeless thing centred in present-day Iran, which is held together by a group of people who share the same ethnicity, culture, heritage, blood and language, who are also very distinct from Arabs and reluctantly converted to Islam.
Kia argues most of this is a recent myth, some contemporary scholarship has explored the invention of Iranian nationalism, however, as Persianate Selves shows, these works still suffer from similar problems to the myths they are deconstructing, which is a tendency to privilege the history of Persia as squarely within or centred on modern Iran itself. “Before nationalism, Persianate selves could hail from many places, and their origins comprised a variety of lineages. The interrelations among these lineages render coherent their multiple modes of imagination, practice, and experience.”
The Persianate was contradictory but as with other Islamic civilisations, there was a coherence to the contradiction, which was reconciled through its hierarchy of meaning, for example, while Islam’s different sects and schools of thought may contradict one another, they are often unified by a shared higher truth of the oneness of God or Tawhid, Kia argues the Persianate follows a similar logic.
To truly comprehend the Persianate, we have to look beyond positivist and empiricist frameworks, the Persianate was as much a metaphysical notion as it was a lived reality. More importantly, the Persianate was not bound to one political dynasty and identification with it crossed political boundaries. “Persianate selfhood thus encompassed a broader range of possibilities than nationalist claims to place and origin allow. This range of Persianate selves not only challenges nationalist narratives but also reveals a larger Persianate world, where proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality.”
Dissecting notions of home, landscape, kinship and memory, Kia provides us with a radically new framework for understanding Persianate culture. In her chapter on kinship, Kia demonstrates why viewing lineage through the prism of biology and notions such as ethnicity, obscures the ways in which pre-moderns thought about origins.
Lineage was not solely dependent upon your paternal birth line, lineage could be socially constructed based on beliefs, actions and affiliations throughout a person's lifetime. Similar to Buddhist monastic orders in India, Sufi lodges in Persianate culture would enable an individual who joined to add to their own lineage after the completion of certain rituals, study and practises, to include their teachers as well as important religious figures such as the Prophet Muhammad to their lineage.
Lineage also includes people adopted into your family, tribe or community, if a child was breastfed by a woman who was not their birth mother, the woman becomes an extension of their family. The ability to hold multiple lineages, most of which is not biological, is difficult to comprehend through a traditional empirical framework especially through the prism of ethnicity and biology. Lineage was esoteric as well as physical and this enabled the possibility for multiple selves and multiplicity inside individuals.
The modern world has seen the shrinking of the self and the homogenisation of origins and belonging. An inescapable conclusion of the Persianate Selves is not the utopia of the past but the messiness of it, it moves the discussion beyond certain reductive categories and expands our possibilities for being and becoming for no historical work is purely a study of the past, but also very much part of the present. We might be forced to question then why do we so readily accept certain boundaries in the name of tradition when the tradition pushed our boundaries? An excellent scholarly study worthy of close study for anyone looking to make sense of our past and present.
Trying to understand what Persian-ness might be before the 18th century is complicated by the fact we live in an era of territorial nationalism, thus when we look back at the past, we look for things that resemble the realities of our world and this can distort our abilities to comprehend past societies.
Mana Kia confronts this problem head-on and aims to tell a history of Persian-ness, which encompasses present-day Iran, Iraq, India and other places, “To remove Persianate culture from the shadow of nationalism, we need to disaggregate the Persianate from Iran.” The book that follows is a tale of complexity, contradiction, multiplicity and constantly shifting ideas about the self, belonging and civilisational heritage. Persianate does not refer to a specific time, land or origin, but to ever-changing times, places and origins.
The idea of Persian culture in the premodern period encompassed a shared language, shared morality, social etiquette and aesthetic concerns known as adab, literature and education, which was transregional from the Middle East to South and Central Asia all part and parcel of Islam.
Indeed Islam and Persian culture are intertwined with one another and the expansion of one often meant the expansion of the other. This is a very different way of thinking about the Persianate from some modern scholars and nationalists, who tend to see Persia as this timeless thing centred in present-day Iran, which is held together by a group of people who share the same ethnicity, culture, heritage, blood and language, who are also very distinct from Arabs and reluctantly converted to Islam.
Kia argues most of this is a recent myth, some contemporary scholarship has explored the invention of Iranian nationalism, however, as Persianate Selves shows, these works still suffer from similar problems to the myths they are deconstructing, which is a tendency to privilege the history of Persia as squarely within or centred on modern Iran itself. “Before nationalism, Persianate selves could hail from many places, and their origins comprised a variety of lineages. The interrelations among these lineages render coherent their multiple modes of imagination, practice, and experience.”
TRENDING NOW
Qatar World Cup
Iran
Palestine
Israel
Breadcrumb
Features Book Club
Persianate Selves: Fostering a convivial identity from regional traditions
Book Club
5 min read
Usman Butt
27 October, 2021
Veering away from traditional conceptualisations of what constitutes Persian culture, Mana Kia's latest book looks at how ambiguous, often fluid and varied networks combined to shape 'Persian-ness' and how this shifts our understanding of identity.
Share
Persianate Selves - Book Review
Recent studies of pre-modern Persia have largely failed to account for the ambiguity of relations and networks within the region [Stanford University Press]
Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism by Mana Kia, asks a very simple question, when pre-moderns thought about the idea of being part of Persian civilization, what did they mean by it?
Trying to understand what Persian-ness might be before the 18th century is complicated by the fact we live in an era of territorial nationalism, thus when we look back at the past, we look for things that resemble the realities of our world and this can distort our abilities to comprehend past societies.
Mana Kia confronts this problem head-on and aims to tell a history of Persian-ness, which encompasses present-day Iran, Iraq, India and other places, “To remove Persianate culture from the shadow of nationalism, we need to disaggregate the Persianate from Iran.” The book that follows is a tale of complexity, contradiction, multiplicity and constantly shifting ideas about the self, belonging and civilisational heritage. Persianate does not refer to a specific time, land or origin, but to ever-changing times, places and origins.
"An inescapable conclusion of the Persianate Selves is not the utopia of the past but the messiness of it, it moves the discussion beyond certain reductive categories and expands our possibilities for being and becoming for no historical work is purely a study of the past, but also very much part of the present"
The idea of Persian culture in the premodern period encompassed a shared language, shared morality, social etiquette and aesthetic concerns known as adab, literature and education, which was transregional from the Middle East to South and Central Asia all part and parcel of Islam.
Indeed Islam and Persian culture are intertwined with one another and the expansion of one often meant the expansion of the other. This is a very different way of thinking about the Persianate from some modern scholars and nationalists, who tend to see Persia as this timeless thing centred in present-day Iran, which is held together by a group of people who share the same ethnicity, culture, heritage, blood and language, who are also very distinct from Arabs and reluctantly converted to Islam.
Kia argues most of this is a recent myth, some contemporary scholarship has explored the invention of Iranian nationalism, however, as Persianate Selves shows, these works still suffer from similar problems to the myths they are deconstructing, which is a tendency to privilege the history of Persia as squarely within or centred on modern Iran itself. “Before nationalism, Persianate selves could hail from many places, and their origins comprised a variety of lineages. The interrelations among these lineages render coherent their multiple modes of imagination, practice, and experience.”
The Persianate was contradictory but as with other Islamic civilisations, there was a coherence to the contradiction, which was reconciled through its hierarchy of meaning, for example, while Islam’s different sects and schools of thought may contradict one another, they are often unified by a shared higher truth of the oneness of God or Tawhid, Kia argues the Persianate follows a similar logic.
To truly comprehend the Persianate, we have to look beyond positivist and empiricist frameworks, the Persianate was as much a metaphysical notion as it was a lived reality. More importantly, the Persianate was not bound to one political dynasty and identification with it crossed political boundaries. “Persianate selfhood thus encompassed a broader range of possibilities than nationalist claims to place and origin allow. This range of Persianate selves not only challenges nationalist narratives but also reveals a larger Persianate world, where proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality.”
Dissecting notions of home, landscape, kinship and memory, Kia provides us with a radically new framework for understanding Persianate culture. In her chapter on kinship, Kia demonstrates why viewing lineage through the prism of biology and notions such as ethnicity, obscures the ways in which pre-moderns thought about origins.
Lineage was not solely dependent upon your paternal birth line, lineage could be socially constructed based on beliefs, actions and affiliations throughout a person's lifetime. Similar to Buddhist monastic orders in India, Sufi lodges in Persianate culture would enable an individual who joined to add to their own lineage after the completion of certain rituals, study and practises, to include their teachers as well as important religious figures such as the Prophet Muhammad to their lineage.
Lineage also includes people adopted into your family, tribe or community, if a child was breastfed by a woman who was not their birth mother, the woman becomes an extension of their family. The ability to hold multiple lineages, most of which is not biological, is difficult to comprehend through a traditional empirical framework especially through the prism of ethnicity and biology. Lineage was esoteric as well as physical and this enabled the possibility for multiple selves and multiplicity inside individuals.
The modern world has seen the shrinking of the self and the homogenisation of origins and belonging. An inescapable conclusion of the Persianate Selves is not the utopia of the past but the messiness of it, it moves the discussion beyond certain reductive categories and expands our possibilities for being and becoming for no historical work is purely a study of the past, but also very much part of the present. We might be forced to question then why do we so readily accept certain boundaries in the name of tradition when the tradition pushed our boundaries? An excellent scholarly study worthy of close study for anyone looking to make sense of our past and present.
October 11, 2026
just a disclaimer - this is a book i read for a core course for my MSc program (in just 2 days). there's a book per week for the next 16 weeks.
while i do not view my sense of self as persianate (the way kia explains it) largely because, like some of my peers, i feel distanced from the language and historical examples, i find myself represented through some points and questions raised throughout the text:
1. "where are you from?" (kia 2021: 2) - as someone who was born in chennai but to parents who were, in turn, born and brought up in odisha, i always find myself at a crossroads while trying to give a definite answer to this question. kia opens the book with this question which then acts as the underlying foundation for interrogating and problematising place and origin in the persian world. like kia, i too do not know how to answer such a question because while my vatan is india, place-making and origin-mapping becomes convoluted. to complicate this further, my father comes from jharkhand while my mother is from rajasthan and uttar pradesh but i have lived in mumbai with my family for the last 16 years. kia also stresses on diverging from biological relations as the only basis for thinking about one's origins and if i were to follow that thread, there is a long list of kinships outside my family, including found families like my friends and mentors who make up my origin.
2. "persianate modes of inclusion could sometimes be extended to places beyond the familiar geocultural grid" (kia: 82). - kia discusses ornaments of place-making, namely the physical, built environment and the social structures around said environment. little did i know that i have applied this approach to place-making well within my own city. for instance, the mumbai that i know is vastly different from the mumbai another peer or my grandparents would visualise. a place is what we make it to be and the mumbai that i now come from is one that not only has a semi-working metro connectivity but is also where i first learnt to drive. i see this approach being applied to contemporary urban studies to think about places beyond their geographical contingencies.
that being said, as i was reading the last few pages, i couldn't help but wonder that the book could have concluded with kia's own thoughts about the questions she poses in the introduction. an attempt to explain how she thinks about her place and origin now as an immigrant in california would have not only rounded off the main line of inquiry she begins with but would have also brought about some more relevance to the discussion around persian identity amid iranian nationalism today.
while i do not view my sense of self as persianate (the way kia explains it) largely because, like some of my peers, i feel distanced from the language and historical examples, i find myself represented through some points and questions raised throughout the text:
1. "where are you from?" (kia 2021: 2) - as someone who was born in chennai but to parents who were, in turn, born and brought up in odisha, i always find myself at a crossroads while trying to give a definite answer to this question. kia opens the book with this question which then acts as the underlying foundation for interrogating and problematising place and origin in the persian world. like kia, i too do not know how to answer such a question because while my vatan is india, place-making and origin-mapping becomes convoluted. to complicate this further, my father comes from jharkhand while my mother is from rajasthan and uttar pradesh but i have lived in mumbai with my family for the last 16 years. kia also stresses on diverging from biological relations as the only basis for thinking about one's origins and if i were to follow that thread, there is a long list of kinships outside my family, including found families like my friends and mentors who make up my origin.
2. "persianate modes of inclusion could sometimes be extended to places beyond the familiar geocultural grid" (kia: 82). - kia discusses ornaments of place-making, namely the physical, built environment and the social structures around said environment. little did i know that i have applied this approach to place-making well within my own city. for instance, the mumbai that i know is vastly different from the mumbai another peer or my grandparents would visualise. a place is what we make it to be and the mumbai that i now come from is one that not only has a semi-working metro connectivity but is also where i first learnt to drive. i see this approach being applied to contemporary urban studies to think about places beyond their geographical contingencies.
that being said, as i was reading the last few pages, i couldn't help but wonder that the book could have concluded with kia's own thoughts about the questions she poses in the introduction. an attempt to explain how she thinks about her place and origin now as an immigrant in california would have not only rounded off the main line of inquiry she begins with but would have also brought about some more relevance to the discussion around persian identity amid iranian nationalism today.
October 30, 2024
It is an amazing topic! Very interesting. Many questions are asked.
I struggled a little bit as there were many new names and places for me. It required a lot of focus and sometimes multiple-reading of the same paragraph to get the idea.
I struggled a little bit as there were many new names and places for me. It required a lot of focus and sometimes multiple-reading of the same paragraph to get the idea.
August 21, 2025
This book singlehandedly changed how I perceive my own identity . absolutely incredible!
June 16, 2025
Not an easy read, but worthwhile topic. Learned a lot and had some great conversations about “adab” with my Persian speaking friends as a result.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews