This “Just in Time” session aims to introduce MLA convention participants to the literature and culture of Afghanistan in light of the recent U.S. withdrawal from the country, and against the backdrop of two decades of war and two centuries of European imperialism in the region. Though these political circumstances have to some extent severed the historically significant connections between Afghanistan and the “Persianate world”—the territories lying between Iran and the northern Indian Subcontinent—the literature of contemporary Afghanistan is in constant negotiation with the millennia-long history of Persian literature which forms its foundation, as well as with the country’s more recent position within global political struggles. The papers in this panel range historically from literature of the medieval period in Afghanistan to contemporary poetry of the Afghan diaspora in the U.S. and, taken together, explore both the diversity of Afghan literature and continuities within this long tradition. Of particular interest to scholars of literature and literary criticism is the primacy of verse in the Afghan tradition from the medieval period down to the present day. The long historical arc examined in this panel reveals some of the ways in which the poetic tradition in Afghanistan and diasporic Afghan communities allows for cultural continuity in spite of, or even in defiance of, political ruptures.

Afghanistan has been much in the news recently because of the chaotic end of the U.S.-Afghan war. However, most reporting lacks the deep cultural knowledge which scholars of Afghan literature, and Persian literature and culture more broadly, can provide. One of the aims of this panel is, therefore, to open a space for education about and discussion of that culture within the MLA. Additionally, Persian literature, of which Afghan literature is an integral part, often falls between traditional area studies-focus curricula—Near Eastern studies does not encompass all of the regions in which Persian was for centuries a prestige literary language, for example Pakistan and northern India; and studies which focus on Persian in the context of the Indian Subcontinent often cannot assimilate for major developments in Persian literature from Iran and Central Asia, especially as those regions’ political histories diverged in the 20^th century. Today, Afghanistan, which has often been positioned “between” major world powers, offers a unique perspective on literary cultures that exist outside of, or in contradistinction to, political formations.

Scholarship on Afghanistan has an almost exclusively contemporary and geopolitical focus, though humanistic and historically-minded studies of the country have much to offer ongoing and developing postcolonial critiques and interventions into literary scholarship. In the modern era Afghanistan has been a “buffer zone” between global superpowers: Russia and British India; the Soviet Union and the “free world”; and, most recently, the U.S. and the Islamic world—the ways in which Afghan literature has represented empire as well as nation and nationalism therefore offer perspectives more complex than binaries of colonizer vs. colonized. In addition, as both a multilingual country (Afghan literature exists in Dari, Pashto, and other vernacular languages) and one with a transnational literature (Dari is mutually intelligible with Farsi, Tajik, and Classical Persian and until recent years the literatures have not been considered separate), Afghanistan offers a valuable perspective on current debates within studies of world literature. Finally, this panel centers the work of scholars with personal ties to Afghanistan and to Afghan communities in emigration and aims to give space to examinations of how Afghan literature and culture has viewed itself, rather than what Afghanistan has meant to interested global powers.

Taken together, the papers proposed here explore Afghan representations of self and other, empire and nation, and globalization. Munazza Ebtikar’s paper discusses the reception and appropriation of a Rabia Balkhi, likely the first female Persian poet, from the medieval period, in modern Afghanistan. Ahmad Rashid Salim’s paper gives an overview of Persian poetry, the most important literary form in the Persian tradition, in the context of Afghanistan, which plays a central though often overlooked role in the history of Persian literature. Mejgan Massoumi’s paper focuses on the music of Ahmad Zahir, a pop singer and radio sensation during the decades in which an independent Afghanistan first joined a globalizing world on its own terms. And Zohra Saed’s paper explores how women’s poetry in the Afghan diaspora negotiates western and Islamic visions of poetic love. All papers will be brief, focused on pithy case studies to illustrate larger critical claims, and will be geared toward a scholarly but non-specialist audience.