“Seek, and you will find [jūyanda yābanda bāshad],” with its Biblical associations, is the message and promise that comes to the 11th century poet-philosopher Nāṣir-i Khusraw in a dream, inspiring him to look beyond his familiar world and thereby instigating the first recorded journey in the New Persian language. This one-day symposium embraces the explorative spirit of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s dream vision to examine what happens when Persianate seekers “find” the realms of alterity referred to in Sassanian times as An-Iran and, likewise, when seekers of An-Iran come into contact and conversation with the peoples of Greater Iran. Travel and its attendant problems of location and translation invite manifold questions of identity and power, and with Persianate lands at the center of its purview, this symposium is particularly concerned with cultural texts that depict the interpersonal and transpersonal relations forged between strangers at the sites of their encounter. We shall consider how writers, filmmakers, and artists evoke these new modes of transcultural/ transnational relationality as well as the modes of translation that are necessary to sustain them.
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