Sufism and Liberation across the Indo-Afghan Border: 1880-1928

How do we understand links between sufism and pro-egalitarian revolutionary activism in the early twentieth century; and how did upland compositions of self and community help constitute revolutionary activism in South Asia more broadly? Using Pashto poetry as my archive I integrate a history of radical egalitarian thought and political practice to a holistic study of self-making; of imperial spatiality; and of shifting gradients of power in the regions between Kabul and Punjab. Amid a chaotic rise of new practices of imperial and monarchic hegemony around the turn of the twentieth century, I argue, older sedimentations of ‘devotee selfhood’ in the high valleys of eastern Afghanistan gave rise, in social spaces preserved by self-reflexive poetic practice and circulation, to conscious desires for avoidance of all forms of hierarchy or sovereignty, in favour of a horizontal politics of reciprocity. Such inchoate drives for freedom later played a role in constituting anti-statist revolutionary subjectivities across great geographical and social distance. From upland sufi roots they rippled outward to intersect with the work of transnational socialist and anti-imperialist militants in Indian nationalist circles too; and even influenced scholars at the heart of the nascent Afghan nation-state

Pashto Border Literature as Geopolitical Knowledge

In this article I read a selection of Pashto literatures as critical thought about geopolitics. Drawing on Michael Shapiro’s concept of aesthetic subjects, as well as on border theory, I argue that the authors, the content, and the literary networks of these works all comment on global relations of power, ranging from the local bordering effects of geopolitics, to systems of knowledge embedded in the spatiality and temporality of empire. I argue that past and current imperial processes have led to fragmenting effects in Afghan society, and literature both reflects and analyzes this. Beyond that, I argue—through the examples of authors’ lives as well as their work—that literary activity in Pashto has actively negotiated such processes throughout its history, and offers strategies for countervailing notions of global connectivity in action as well as thought. The decentralized and multiperspective images of life in these works sit in counterpoint not only to the systems-oriented views that drive military and other policy in Afghanistan during the ongoing US moment, but also to universalist perspectives upon which disciplines like world history and geopolitics traditionally rely. Additionally, though, Pashto literary networks themselves also produce alternative structures. This contributes to the aesthetic turn in IR by arguing that it is not only the aesthetic vision in works that challenges dominant knowledge; the shape of the Pashto literary formation itself, organic with its content, is an alternate form of knowledge-in-practice about the contemporary world

Ernest Renan's Race Problem

This review revisits the role of race in Ernest Renan's thought by situating contemporary debates in a long perspective that extends back to his texts and their earliest interpreters. Renan is an ambivalent figure: from the 1850s onwards he used ‘race’ to denote firm differences between the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ language groups in history; but after 1870, he repeatedly condemned biological racism in various venues and contexts. I show that the tension between these two sides of Renan's thought has continually resurfaced in criticism and historiography ever since the late nineteenth century. Renan's racial views have been subject to particularly close scrutiny following Léon Poliakov's and Edward Said's critiques in the 1970s, but the ensuing debate risks developing into an inconclusive tug-of-war between attack and apologia. I propose three fresh directions for research. First, historians should situate the evolution of Renan's ideas on race in closer biographical context; secondly, they must reconsider the cultural authority of his texts, which is often more asserted than proven; thirdly, they should pay greater attention to his reception outside Europe, particularly regarding his writing on Islam

Les gloses françaises dans les commentaires talmudiques de Raschi

Arsène Darmesteter et D.S. Blondhei

Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible [suite)

Darmesteter Arsène. Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible [suite). In: Revue des études juives, tome 54, n°108, octobre-décembre 1907. pp. 205-235

Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible

Darmesteter Arsène. Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible. In: Revue des études juives, tome 54, n°107, juillet-septembre 1907. pp. 1-34

Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible (suite et fin)

Darmesteter Arsène. Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible (suite et fin). In: Revue des études juives, tome 56, n°111, juillet-septembre 1908. pp. 70-98

Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible

Darmesteter Arsène. Les Gloses françaises de Raschi dans la Bible. In: Revue des études juives, tome 53, n°106, avril-juin 1907. pp. 161-193