Borderwork: Exploring connections across Iranian and European literatures

These attempts to build relations make for a surreal juxtaposition with the situation we currently face, in which my native country is aggressively bombarding a land whose cultural heritage I study, teach, and celebrate. It was thus with a mingled sense of pessimism and optimism that I gave my seminar for the IAS on another kind of entanglement between Persian and Western cultural zones. I hoped that, even if I cannot change anything on the ground, perhaps we could finish the discussion with an enriched awareness of the shared history between the two regions, and pass that awareness on to our respective communities.

The seminar, entitled “Borderwork: Floire & Blancheflor and its Persian Interlocutors,” presented a snapshot of my current project, tentatively titled Love at the Limits. In this work, I am interested in understanding the way that early New Persian literature, particularly in its formative romantic and epic texts, “worked the border” for its authors, patrons, and audiences. This matters, I think, because New Persian established itself through a complex process of translation and adaptation from a dizzying array of sources: from ancient Greek to Sanskrit, from Arabic to Middle Persian, and from oral traditions of Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist lore. These efforts played into an attempt to establish this new literary culture within a broader constellation, what we might call a re-figuration and negotiation of “selves” and “others.” These relations were by no means necessarily nor exclusively adversarial, but they were complicated. In the paper, I spoke about how one work in particular, Ayyuqi’s Varqa & Gulshah, engages with – forms, deforms, subverts, redefines – boundaries of language, time, geography, gender, and religion, through the vehicle of a popular love story of Arabic origin, now recast in Persian as a sweeping tale of love, adventure, war, and redemption. Considering this tale’s significant parallels with a contemporary tale that was making the rounds in Europe and the Mediterranean – the story of Floire & Blancheflor – I suggested that one way the two might be compared, beyond the presence of shared plot points and motifs, is through the lens of borderwork. Drawing from similar terms in psychology and media studies, borderwork might be understood as the ongoing process of narrating a social imaginary. The feedback I received from the IAS fellows in the audience was extremely valuable in helping me think through what this analytic is doing for me, and how it might be refined and clarified as the work goes on.

All in all, my time at Durham has been enormously productive, in giving me the space to read, write, and workshop this and other ideas in a collaborative and supportive environment that brings together colleagues from a diverse range of disciplines and backgrounds. While I am sad to see it coming to an end, the traces of these last ten weeks will surely leave a visible mark in my scholarship for years to come.

Dr Cameron Cross
University of Michigan