Edited conference volume from Afghanistan in Ink: Literatures of Nation, War, and Exile, held at UCLA in 2010.
The first scholarly survey of modern Afghan literature, tracing patterns of thought and identity, and their destabilization in contemporary times.
Afghanistan in Ink uses a vast and largely unknown corpus of twentieth-century Afghan Dari and Pashto literature to show for Afghans have conceived of their modern history and how writers' patronage or exile has dominated teh 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 Muslims 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.
Nile Green is professor of South Asian and Islamic history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the UCLA Asia Institute's Program on Central Asia.
Nushin Arbabzadah is an Afghan journalist and research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.