Afghanistan in ink: literature between diaspora and nation

Abstract

Afghanistan in Ink uses a vast and largely unknown corpus of twentieth-century Afghan Dari and Pashto literature to show how Afghans have conceived of their modern history and how writers' patronage or exile has dominated the contours of that history. Drawing on an abundance of Afghan-language sources, chapters by international experts reveal a disruptive twentieth-century dynamic, in which literary globalization has caused the destabilization of the state by importing multiple, conflicting ideologies. Afghanistan in Ink situates the twentieth century's itinerant and exiled Afghan writers within their transnational contexts and maps Afghan artistic and ideological interactions with Muslim and Western nations. The volume emphasizes the social and political dimensions of this literature and, through its extensive introduction, provides both specialists and nonspecialists with unique, inside perspectives on the religious, political, and cultural debates shaping modern Afghan society.