خلاصه ماشینی:
In his preface to Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad, Ha mid Dabashi locates the origins of the book in the 2016 US presidential election, after which the newly-elected Donald Trump signed an Executive Order banning citizens of six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.
Focusing on such travelers as Mirza Saleh Shirazi, Hajj Muhammad Ali Sayyah, and Zeyn al-Abedin Maragheh’i, Dabashi commends their audacity to leave their homelands for a life of adventure, and remap the colonial world in the process.
Dabashi’s ultimate critique in this chapter is of the bifurcation of the travelogue genre between those penned by Orientalist European travelers like James Morier’s Hajji Baba, and those authored by “Muslim and other geographers,” like Maragheh’i himself, who reclaimed and remapped the world, based on their own desires and interests (333).
Indeed, not all Iranians who travelled to Europe harbored a potentially liberating agenda: for exam ple, Dabashi invokes Mirza Saleh multiple times in the fifth chapter, with out any reference to his companions dispatched to study artillery, chemis try, and engineering as manifestations of modernity and/or coloniality.
Notwithstanding the above issues, Reversing the Colonial Gaze is a timely contribution to studies of Persian travel writing that seek to revive a cosmopolitan and multifaceted public sphere which was previously denied, or circumscribed, through the prism of colonial modernity in both Iranian and Euro-American intellectual discourse.