Postcolonial critiques of the War on Terror, waged by the US and its allies, have shed light on the innovations of surveillance and drone technologies, carceral logics, humanitarian aid as soft empire, homonationalism, and debility. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic US evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021, after a twenty-year occupation, and as we live in the ongoing devastations of the 2026 US-Israel attack on Iran, this panel asks, what happens to such critiques if we extend the scope of critical inquiry on Euroamerican empire, terror, and race to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century encounters between West and Central Asia and Britain? Often left at the margins of postcolonial critique, the early semicolonial settings of Afghanistan and Iran, together with their tortuous histories over the past century, have much to offer in enriching and reshaping our understanding of the wars of the early twenty-first century and the complexities and contradictions of emancipatory narratives. Furthermore, while studies of Afghanistan and Iran tend to keep them separate, their ambivalent status as imperialized but not colonized by the British and later the US, and their current regimes’ efforts to assert sovereignty while repressing their own populations, suggest that studying them together yields greater insights into the failures and casualties of empire.

This panel brings together a range of literary scholars at different ranks—graduate student, associate professor, assistant professor, and contingent faculty, respectively—working at the crossroads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British-Persian and British-Afghan encounters and their afterlives. The panel revisits four key historical moments through literary and archival sources and brings them to bear on the ongoing work of empire: In “Masculine Semicoloniality: Framing Afghanistan for the Eighteenth-Century Anglophone World,” Mursal Sidiqi presents on Jonas Hanway’s British history of the Afghan Empire, published in 1753 in response to the Afghans’ siege of Isfahan and overthrow of the Persian Empire in 1722. This text reflects Britain’s scramble to learn about the Afghans’ history and to develop a gendered rhetoric that could contain and domesticate this new imperial threat. In “The Syntax and Temporality of Regime Change,” Zarena Aslami reads the British-issued Simla Manifesto, which announced their invasion of Afghanistan and plan to reinstate an ousted amir, who was their ally, and the counter-manifesto released by the current Afghan leaders. The first British war of regime change, the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–1842) as it came to be called, unleashed a familiar grammar of the “not only, but also” and a temporality of repetition that characterizes endless war in the present. In “Misencounters: Savushun and Iran's Memoranda of Misunderstanding,” Niloofar Sarlati reads an Iranian 1969 historical novel set in the final years of the Second World War alongside the concessions and memoranda of understanding negotiated during that period, which mark only one earlier iteration of negotiations that continue to unfold between Iran and the United States today, perpetuating a longstanding condition of suspense. Finally, in “Where is Enlightenment?: The Problem of Freedom after the Iranian Revolution,” Taymaz Pour Mohammad revisits Michel Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) alongside his return to the question of the Enlightenment, to think through the recent atrocities within and against Iran and how they have sparked sharply polarizing narratives of emancipation, one opposing domestic oppression, while the other resisting imperial aggression.

The four papers on this panel share common touch points in time across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and in space in the region of West and Central Asia, creating a complex historical picture leading up to 9/11 and its aftermath. The presider will give brief introductions of each panelist and then panelists will have 12–14 minutes to present, leaving at least 15 minutes for discussion. As the US and its allies continue to wage war in this region and continue to produce contradictory narratives to justify their actions and violence against the civilians and environments of other nations, this panel offers its audience ways to historicize, contextualize, and map connections among seemingly disparate moments and empires. As all four papers in this panel demonstrate, there is—and has long been—an ambivalence in both the ways this region has been subjected to colonial and imperial projects and the ways it has engaged, negotiated, and resisted them. As a site of revolutionary cultures and cultures of revolution, of resistance as well as reaction, the region occupies an in-between position that has too often been overlooked in postcolonial critique. Attending to this complexity productively unsettles and complicates the conceptual frameworks of postcolonial studies and emancipatory narratives.