Our panel reflects the growing awareness of the importance of transcontinental intellectual and literary relations to the shaping of early modernity. Our three 15-minute papers, and the ensuing 20-minute discussion will explore the textual networks in which the cultures of early modern Afro-Eurasia were embedded. Our papers focus on examples of intercultural translation. The work of early modern intellectuals, and the striking parallels and analogies among the translations they performed in various corners of the early modern world, reveal the extent to which early modern literary and textual cultures were enmeshed in shared frames of reference that defined political, religious, and scientific dicourse across the three continents.

Kaveh Hemmat opens our panel with a consideration of the utopian legend appearing in premodern Persian texts depicting East Asia. A key example is 'Ali Akbar Khatayi's Book of China (Khataynameh), a 1516 Persian description of the Ming state that was the most substantial description of East Asia in any west Afro-Eurasian language before the late sixteenth century. In Islamicate culture, East Asia held a unique status as a site of utopian imagination within the mapped, traveled world. Close thematic parallels between this utopian legend and utopian Sinophilism in English and other European writing are strongly suggestive of common roots in the folklore of travelers and cultural brokers. This paper explores the semiology of this utopian discourse in Khatayi's Book of China, in relation to the set of interlaced developments that constituted global early modernity. Writers who sought to introduce readers to the elite culture of China—Khatayi, as well as his European successors such as Matteo Ricci and Juan Gonzales de Mendoza—were all engaged in a task of cultural translation. Khatayi's approach to cultural translation involved using citations of gnostic poetry that referred to figures of the Persian epic tradition and Islamic sacred history. These mythic figures—kings such as Jamshid, Zahhak, and Solomon, and events such as the Deluge—were concrete symbols possessed of geographical and temporal specificity, but also connected to present figures such as the Chinese and Ottoman emperors, via analogical or typological relationships.

Nigel Smith considers the later poetry, Afrikaanse Thalia (1668-70), of Amsterdam’s physician, poet, playwright and songwriter Willem Godschalk van Focquenbroch (1640-70) who transformed his verse through residence as fiscaal for the Dutch West India Company in the trading fort of Elmina in present day Ghana, reacting to local conditions and people while translating Virgil. I juxtapose it with African singing, dancing and music heard by Focquenbroch which challenged his own musical categories. One extreme includes recited panegyric, the apaee, of the nascent Asante empire, north of the coast, trading with the Dutch for gold and slaves. In the frame are also the cultural forms left by Portugal, displaced by the Dutch in Elmina in 1637. Not only was Portuguese the lingua franca of Dutch trading companies and the Gold Coast, native Elminians and the sizeable mixed-race Afro-European community also had a confraternity devoted to the Virgin Mary with regular processions and religious rituals: Focquenbroch encountered both sharp differences and crossover zones. The community was between empires; no part of it exercised full sovereignty. At the same time, all members, including the Africans, enjoyed commodities coming from the further eastern reaches of the Dutch East India Company: glass and textiles.

Ferenc Csirkés’s paper sheds a new light on Iranian early modernity and modernity through revisiting the problem of Iran’s connectivity to other traditions in the late eighteenth century. It focuses on the Persian translation of Katib Çelebi’s paradigmatic seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkish geographical compendium, the Cihannüma, which combines Islamic with early modern western geographical knowledge. Up to the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century, very few Ottoman Turkish works attracted Iranian connoisseurs, whereas the impact of Persian—the language of cultural interaction in Iran—on Ottoman culture is difficult to underestimate. The aforesaid Persian translation was produced in 1214/1799-98 by one Muhammad Charmahali for the founder of the Qajar dynasty (1789-1925), Aqa Muhammad Khan (r. 1789-1797), and seems to be part of a wave of heightened interest in geography among the new Iranian elite. While the intellectual underpinnings of Iranian modernity are usually located in the combination of Western influence and local traditions, I will argue that even prior to modernization and westernization in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, there was interest in Iran in the achievements of modern geography and cosmography which, however, came to Iran not from Europe but from the Ottoman world.