with Nile Green

British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) Seminar Series

Wednesday 21 September, 2022, 6:00pm (GMT)

Zoom Webinar

https://www.bips.ac.uk/event/a-persianate-japanology-the-reach-and-limits-of-inter-asian-exchange/

In the wake of the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905, intellectuals from Iran, India, and Afghanistan looked to Japan as a model for achieving military and industrial modernization without adopting Western culture. Probing the secrets of Japan’s success, they wrote poems, travelogues, and histories of Japan in Persian. Yet despite the new communications infrastructures of the period, there remained formidable barriers to inter-Asian understanding, whether through differences of language or culture. Drawing on Green’s forthcoming book How Asia Found Herself (Yale, 2022), this talk explores the gap between connection and comprehension that has been greatly underplayed in recent studies of global history.