Afghanistan in Ink

Afghanistan is often presented as a world isolated from outside influence, frozen in a medieval past. Green and Arbabzadah, however, explore how Afghan literature sheds insight into the country’s history of intense international influence, which has contributed to the fragility of the emerging state. This book, the first to offer multiple perspectives on the link between literature and society in Afghanistan through an exclusive emphasis on literature written by Afghans, is an important contribution to an emerging field of study. The volume’s interdisciplinary mandate is an apt choice for its emphasis on Afghanistan’s negotiation of overlapping ideologies. This volume provides a necessary call to arms for scholars of Afghanistan to explore the links between literature and society at greater depth. Afghanistan in Ink includes ten chapters, in roughly chronological order. It brings diverse disciplines into productive conversation with each other – scholars of history, folklore, and comparative literature comment on internationalism in literature, broadly defined. The book’s aim is three-fold: (1) to employ literary texts as reflections of Afghan society, (2) to focus on literature produced by Afghans, and (3) to emphasize the link between the nation’s “fragility” and its placement at the crossroads of international influences. (p. xv) Too often presented as a land separated from external influence, and so insulated against modernity, Afghanistan appears in this text as a product of an international dialectic. The literature of Afghanistan provides a resource to understand the fragmentation of a society under the influence of “relentless internationalism”. (p. 3) The book is successful in its three aims, focusing on Afghan texts to highlight the international character of literary conversations from the nineteenth century to the present.