In this episode, Rustin speaks with Lindsey Stephenson, who is currently conducting postgraduate research at Princeton University, and the new host of Ajam's Indian Ocean podcast series. The Indian Ocean series explores topics related to the Islamo-Arabic and Persianate world from the perspective of the Indian Ocean littoral and the people who traversed its waters. These conversations aim to rethink narratives of history and culture, which have been traditionally boxed in by land-based territorial demarcations and regional studies frameworks. This series invites listeners to imagine the complex interconnectedness of life from East Africa to Southeast Asia and beyond. In the first Indian Ocean series episode, Dr. Stephenson discusses her research on pre-oil mobility and modernity in the Persian Gulf, as well as its connections to Indian Ocean at large. While many people think that modernity came to the Gulf when oil was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lindsey demonstrates that global markets, labor demands, and capital from the date and pearling industries led to massive changes in the social, political, and legal spheres of the Persian Gulf several decades earlier. ...
In this episode, Rustin is joined by Neda Maghbouleh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto. She is the author of [The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Stanford University Press, 2017).](https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24756) Neda is a long-time friend of Ajam and an early guest of the first iteration of the Ajam podcast back in 2014. Since our first conversation, she has published her book, which explores the history of ethnic and racial classification in the United States and how Iranians and other Middle Eastern Americans have moved across the color line from "white" to "brown." After discussing the major themes and reception of her book, Dr. Maghbouleh talks about her latest project focusing on the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada since 2015. The five-year study follows newcomer mothers and their teenage children as they adjust to their new environment and deal with a wide variety of stressors Rustin closes out the episode with "Chiftetelli," a 1949 Armenian song by the Nore Ike Orchestra. ...
In this episode, Ali interviews Dr. Mana Kia, an Associate Professor in Columbia University’s department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies about her book, [Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism](http://https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29033) (Stanford University Press, 2020). If contemporary notions of being Persian are rooted in recent history, what did it mean to be Persian before nationalism? In the interconnected spaces of premodern Asia, Persian served as a language of learning and shared communication that facilitated the exchange of texts, practices, goods, and ideas, creating a Persianate cultural sphere. Persian not only provided a shared language but also gave access to a whole series of broader ideas and practices. In this older sense of being Persian, Dr. Kia has uncovered a conception of selfhood based on a very different understanding of place and origin. In it, people always understood themselves in relation to multiple collectives, not singular nations, origins, or ethnicities. Her study argues that the wide range of possible Persianate selves allowed for a type of pluralism that the nation state has been unable to provide, a pluralism that has more promise than the eurocentric notion of tolerance. The types of kinship that are produced through these shared lineages all center around the vast notion of adab. Adab is “aesthetic in ethical form,” a notion of the proper form of things that guides seeing, experiencing, thinking, and even desiring. It was adab, she argues, that kept Persianate worlds together even as their societies collapsed-- providing a shared pluralistic moral order and language that allowed them to reconstitute after each collapse. Key to this were literary genres like poetry or tazkira writing, serving as acts of commemoration in ...
