Reversing the Colonial Gaze

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).

• 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.

'In a series of fascinating vignettes, Dabashi gives us an enormously rich account of travellers from Iran and India who ethnographically recorded other cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe in the nineteenth century. In the process, he forcefully reminds us that the intellectual discovery of the world was not a uniquely Western virtue.' Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University