Across the Black Sands and the Red

Travel Writing, Nature, and the Reclamation of the Eurasian Steppe Circa 1850

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8965641
AutoresArash Khazeni (autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen42
Número4
Páginas591-614
Fecha de publicación2010-10-15
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743810000838
OpenAlexW2118032417
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas59

Through a reading of 19th-century Persian travel narratives, this article locates the history of Iran and Central Eurasia within recent literature on global frontier processes and the encounter between empire and nature. It argues that Persianate travel books about Central Eurasia were part of the imperial project to order and reclaim the natural world and were forged through the material encounter with the steppes. Far from a passive act of collecting information and more than merely an extension of the observer's preconceptions, description was essential to the expansion and preservation of empire. Although there exists a vast literature on Western geographical and ethnographic representations of the Middle East, only recently have scholars begun to mine contacts that took place outside of a Western colonial framework and within an Asian setting. Based on an analysis of Riza Quli Khan Hidayat's Sifaratnama-yi Khvarazm , the record of an expedition sent from the Qajar Dynasty to the Oxus River in 1851, the article explores the 19th-century Muslim “discovery” of the Eurasian steppe world. The expedition set out to define imperial boundaries and to reclaim the desert, but along the way it found a permeable “middle ground” between empires, marked by transfrontier and cross-cultural exchanges

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnography · Frontier · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Steppe · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History · Soviet and Russian History