2024 Articles

Lingering with Adab, before Rushing to Literature

Kia, Mana

This essay aims to stay awhile with the concept of adab (proper asthetic and ethical form) before rushing to the Euro-American concept and practice of literature, which has been the translation of adab common since the late nineteenth century. Against the broader histories of this translation, I focus on the older meaning of adab in early mod- ern Persian traditions and ask what it can show us about how texts come into being and gain meaning within its world. Texts were gifts, created and exchanged within various forms of companionship. Adab was textual form at once aesthetic and ethical. But it also had an important constitutive sociality, beyond the institutional, one unfamiliar to our contemporary understanding of literature. This lingering brings a presumed reading subject into view—a homo amicus, let us say—embedded in and concerned with social relationships. It also proposes that these generative relations provide cues for broadening our array of interpretive practices.