Description:

Please join the East Asia Research Forum as they host James Pickett (University of Pittsburgh) Associate Professor, Department of History.

From 1885 to 1920, the protectorate of Bukhara constantly exchanged paperwork with colonial Russian authorities. The communication challenges created by this colonial relationship were partly linguistic, but bureaucratic technologies and imperial categories of knowledge posed equally formidable barriers to mutual comprehension. Bridging this conceptual gap required both a grounding in Islamic literary arts and an encyclopedic knowledge of colonial Russian society on the part of Bukharan scribes. Over time, quotidian bureaucratic exchange transformed the very language of Bukharan communication, creating a parallel bureaucracy for interactions with the Russian empire and, along with it, a new register of "colonial Persian": an unintentional language modernization project without any modernists. This research positions translation government bureaucracy as a locus for the superposition of imperial taxonomies on indirectly ruled territories in Central Asia.

ZOOM ONLY

Please register for this event.