Session Abstract

This panel seeks to interrogate issues of social and cultural change in the greater Persianate world through the lens of “publics”; that is, imagined social landscapes created by the reflexive and continual circulation of performative discourse among strangers. We invite historians of all geographical and period specialization to think about how the concept of “public”, from a variety of perspectives, may be fruitfully employed across time and space to better understand social change; and to test the limits of this metaphor of public.
Cultural changes linking court power and the street in Safavid Iran; rising communitarian and class identities in colonial India; the history of taliban and populist public opinion in British India and contemporary Pakistan – in all these cases, political trends appear to be manifestations of much larger sociocultural shifts. These shifts took place in areas of life that may not have fit the label of “political” according to ideologies of the day, but they nonetheless changed the fundamental terms of political power through the collective actions of strangers over time.

How can we trace shifts in how strangers imagined their relationships to others? Can being sensitive to performative expressions of relationships enable a richer reading of historical source materials common to the Persianate world? In what ways can performance-centered analysis highlight social agency and constraint? What political consequence might such imagined relationships, and the individual action they channeled into collectivity, have had? In our papers we find that participative rituals, for example, may represent as well as produce social change. Sudden semiotic changes within a restricted group’s literary production, as another example, can be both symptom of and catalyst for shifts in much wider cross-class or cross-regional community consciousness. In all of our papers, we explore intersections between literacy and oral mediation of publics; and how concrete networks, political machinery, and social formations mesh with broader cultural milieus.

At the same time, the study of non-western societies opens up new theoretical ground in research into “the public”. In the papers above, we note how strangers imagined a commonality with others outside of print mediation, the major area of inquiry in most public sphere research. We also note how different types of political inequality – imperial and colonial societies; indirect rule through tribe – translated into different strategies for collective negotiation of power through discourse alone. This can help make theories of public activism and agency in our own society more sensitive to subaltern cultural politics.

In sum, applying a common social metaphor across disparate geographical, social, and temporal settings allows us to problematize certain historiographical categories. At the same time, the settings of our cases studies share broad commonalities of long-term cultural inheritance: types of bureaucratic language, modes of exercising and avoiding power, relationships to translocal authority and ideals of rule; and types of long-distance social relationships beyond the narrowly political. This allows us to build upon broadly common empirical ground in interrogating the usefulness of the theoretical metaphor of “public”.