Date:
Tuesday, April 25, 2023, 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location:
Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Room 201
Parwana Fayyaz (Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge), Modern Heroines: Women in Classical Persian Literature. Co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
This lecture focuses on the female characters who are at the centre of love poems written in Persian between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. It argues that these women, such as the ruthless Vis, the clever Shirin, the artful Fitna, the meticulous Layla, the glorious Zulikha, and even the notorious Absal, to name but a few, are distinctively modern, especially with regard to their attitudes and occupations. They engage with the physical world in different ways, and project radically distinct forms of selfhood and emancipation. They do so through their roles as lovers, beloveds, daughters, mothers, wives, queens, servants, messengers, and wet nurses, and sometimes by combining these roles together in new and exciting ways. My work increases our understanding of this rich literary history, for it reveals just how complex and just how modern some of these women appear. This revelation, in turn, raises important questions about the relevancy of feminism and modernity in the study of pre-modern cultures of the Persianate world.