Afghanistan in Ink Literature between Diaspora and Nation

摘要

Afghanistan in Ink Literature between Diaspora and Nation originates in a conference held at UCLA in 2010. Its focus is language and literature in twentieth and twenty-first century Afghanistan, and their relationship to developments in other areas of Afghan society, culture and politics. One of its central themes is the efforts of the Afghan state and Afghan elites to develop a national language and a literature to go with it. This was a challenging task, since the country's principal languages, Persian and Pashto, were also the mother tongues of so many people living outside its borders. In the first chapter Green and Arbabzadah explore efforts to develop identifiably Afghan versions of both, which were supported by the creation of cultural institutions such as the Kabul Literary Society and the Pashto Academy. The moderniser Mahmud Tarzi (1865-1933) made a major contribution to this, and to the development of twentieth century Afghan literature, as Chapter 2 explains. Among his other achievements, in 1911 he founded the first regularly published Afghan newspaper, the Siraj al-Akhbar Afghaniya ('Torch of Afghan News'). He was also the first to refer to Afghan Persian as Dari and claim it was a distinct language.