Lost in Paradise: On the “Coloniality” of English Literary Studies in Iran

Abstract

It is said that Mirza Jaʿfar, one of the first Iranian students to study in England, was an admirer of the poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, a classic of English literature. On a tour of Cambridge shortly after his arrival in 1815, Mirza visited Christ's College, Milton's alma mater, and took as a memento some leaves from a mulberry tree that was planted in 1608, the year the great poet was born. Historian Nile Green speculates that Mirza Jaʿfar could at that moment have been whispering the lines from book 10 of Paradise Lost, in which Milton alludes to the northern Iranian cities of "Casbeen" (Qazvin) and "Tauris" (Tabriz) as sanctuaries from a "Russian Foe," namely Ivan the Terrible, who overran his Tartar neighbours in 1556. 1 Green makes this assumption because Iran was at the time of Mirza Jaʿfar's journey in the midst of a colonial war with Russia, not to mention that the sound of "Tauris," Mirza's hometown of Tabriz, must have been music to his ears. In fact, Green argues that the journey of the first group of Iranian students to England was a dialogic encounter between two nations in which the students sought not only the new sciences of Europe but also brought their unique perspectives into the public sphere of Regency Britain, providing, with their travels and travelogues, "an alternative history of England." 2 My contention in this roundtable is that unlike Mirza Jaʿfar's creative reading of Milton in the 1810s, the academic institution of English literature in contemporary Iran is an intellectually colonized project. If in the early stages of their encounters with modernity some Iranian thinkers treated English as a medium of reflection upon the self and its worldliness, the academic institution of English literature as a "secular" branch of the liberal arts in postrevolutionary Iran is in a crisis of late modernity: a postcolonial condition that is ironically Eurocentric despite the anticolonial ideology of the state, oblivious to the presence of Anglo-American cultures of imperialism in Iran since at least the dawn of colonialism. 3 It is my concern that the inability of Iran-based departments of English literature to make any original contribution to literary scholarship around the world will have dire implications for the state of the humanities in light of the geopolitical and environmental challenges that we face in Iran and the broader region. A Post/Colonial Crisis In Iran, during the second half of the 20th century, two historical watersheds formed the foundations of the humanities in general, and of English literary studies in particular: the Cold War during the Pahlavi era and the cultural revolution following the Islamic Revolution. 4