Description: "Persianate Selves challenges accepted notions of what it meant to be Persian in the eighteenth century. Drawing on commemorative texts, this book reveals that to be Persian was not necessarily to be Iranian. Persians hailed from a variety of places across Central, South, and West Asia, and their sense of self was not tied to modern ideas of nationalism, religion, or race. Mana Kia explores the common education and cultural logic that connected Persians, before the concept of the nation, describing how place, origin, and memory created a sense of self unbounded by the limits of colonial modernity"--
Review Quotes: "Few questions are more vexed in the study of early modern Asia, with evidence more evanescent, than how people identified before nationalism. Drawing on dozens of Persian texts, Mana Kia scrutinizes their conceptions of place, movement, memory, lineage, origins, and onomastics to denaturalize the nationalist ties between land and language. Persianate Selves is an invaluable vade mecum for navigating the transregional Persianate past."--Nile Green "editor of The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca"