“Aria Fani’s Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians and Literary Nationalism vividly brings to life the shared literary journey of two neighbouring societies whose stories are more intertwined than public discourse or national histories usually admit. At its centre, this book tells of people and communities, Afghan and Iranian writers, editors, readers, and dreamers, searching not just for modern literature, but for a sense of belonging in a rapidly changing world. The book was awarded the Rene Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in 2025.Fani, who is an Assistant Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, challenges the idea that literary modernity in Iran and Afghanistan was simply and only borrowed from the West. His lens is refreshing and methodologically rigorous. It delves into an East-East literary comparison rather than simply East-West or North-South (p. 3). Through the book, Fani shows how these societies have drawn deeply from their common Persian heritage, by using language, poetry, and storytelling to shape new national identities.The book breaks down Persian terms such as adab, with its long historical meaning related to ethics and etiquette, and adabiyat, the Persian term for literature, showing how these evolved in consonance with, at times in resistance to, European literary ideas. Adabiyat, until the late nineteenth century, was a fluid and ‘context-dependent notion’ (p. 1). It was only by the mid-twentieth century that the term adabiyat came into conceptual alignment with the European notion of literature (pp. 44-45).Adabiyat’s transition from malleable context-dependency to self-referential institutionalization, Fani shows, was hardly seamless. It was not just top-down reform or policy. Rather, the transformation took place in the lively debates and unpredictable collaborations among writers and intellectuals, the energy of voluntary reading circles, and periodicals that crisscrossed borders. These were spaces of possibility where new literary collections took shape and where different visions of the nation’s future could be imagined, contested, and sometimes reconciled (pp. 124-136). The book’s overarching argument therefore is that the rise of literature in Iran and Afghanistan emerged through transregional dialogue. Persian heritage became the bedrock of composing national cultures. This story of literary nationalism goes beyond grand theories or state decrees. It is about people in conversation, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but always influencing one another.One of the book’s great achievements is its refusal to reduce Afghanistan to an appendix of Iranian culture. Fani instead depicts Afghan thinkers and institutions at the centre of the story: as producers of Persian literary innovation. The book gives Afghan voices room to breathe, especially in recounting the complexities of a country simultaneously invested in Persian (Dari) and Pashto as official languages. Fani argues, ‘Adabiyat by default exceeded its entanglements with the nation-state as its unit of belonging,’ as Persian ‘was—and still remains—distinctly transregional and international’ (p. 2). The book argues that the history of the Persian heritage is contrary to the notion of the early twentieth century’s romantic nationalism, which was based on the singularity of language, race, and religion. Fani argues, when ‘Adabiyat is taught in one national language, formulated, codified, and packaged by institutions to safeguard the existing racial and gender hierarchies as well as the economic inequities that undergird capitalism’, it does an unimaginable harm to humans and our ‘warming’ planet (pp. 181 & 182).Fani divides the book into three different but carefully interwoven conceptual frames. The first explores how intellectuals from Iran and Afghanistan established literature as a common conceptual category based on their shared Persian heritage. The second looks at how intellectuals from both countries associated with their ‘anjomans’ (societies), incorporated and rejected each other’s narratives regarding Persian literature while remaining loyal to their respective ideas of nationalism. The last and final section focuses on the separate development of literary nationalism within Iran and Afghanistan before returning to the transnational perspective and exploring Afghan-Iran travelogues. Periodicals, in Fani’s telling, become miniature worlds unto themselves. According to him, readers and writers in cities scattered across both countries, and even in their diasporas, could negotiate what ‘modern literature’ ought to be by engaging through periodicals.Crucially, Fani’s account does not end in the past. It connects the crosscutting literary mingling of the common Persianate heritage with Iran and Afghanistan’s present-day realities. It touches upon how the migration of Afghans into Iran led to frictions as well as solidarities. Fani highlights the persistence of deeply rooted anxieties about cultural purity and national identity among modern Iranians due to the movement of approximately four million Afghans into Iran after the Soviet invasion. Through an anecdotal account, Fani exemplifies how present-day Iranian perceptions of Afghans ‘oscillate between denigration and exoticisation’ (p. viii). Romantic nationalism supersedes the transboundary nature of literary nationalism in Afghanistan as well, seen since the early twentieth century, and recently with the Taliban, which derives its Afghan identity mostly from Pashto culture. Unlike the term ‘Afghan’ borrowed from Pashto, the more inclusive term ‘Afghanistani’ used by poet Mohammad Kazem Kazemi refers to all the individuals residing in the country (p. xiv).Fani tactfully avoids the trap of smoothing Persianate identity into an easy, romantic unity. He draws out the ways nationalism magnified differences, pressing states and intellectuals to answer hard questions about what (and who) belonged, and what (and who) did not. His analysis of literary nationalism presents ‘certain tools which could help to better understand and challenge the obsessions and anxieties that it (literary nationalism) has generated, regardless of readers’ national origins or disciplinary background’ (p. xv). The book urges a move beyond fundamentalism, asking readers to observe the ways that literary nationalism can unite as much as divide.While the analytical focus remains on Iran and Afghanistan, this work gestures to a larger Persianate world, one stretching from the Balkans, through Central Eurasia, and into South Asia. In a talk about Reading Across Borders, Fani explained that there are sufficient works on Persianate linkages in the realm of comparative literature. A study on Iran-Afghanistan linkages seemed like a ‘low-hanging fruit’ as he had not come across any significant work in which these wider Persianate connections do not distract from the local lived experiences that sit at the core of his book.Reading Across Borders resonates with the reader not just because of its historical insight, but due to Fani’s deep regard for the humanity of his subjects. He introduces writers who worried over words, activists who built reading societies from nothing, officials torn between pride and pragmatism, and ordinary people caught in the sweep of national change. Through this human lens, even the complexities of inter-state politics become intimate and recognizable.Ultimately, this work is as much about being human as it is about being Iranian or Afghan. It is about the creative energy and vulnerability that are involved in making something new from something shared. It is about how people debate, defend, share, and sometimes lose their traditions in the pressing world of modernity. This makes the book a must read not just for scholars of literature and history, but for anyone interested in how culture and identity are continually made and remade through interactions, common literary heritages, and political conflict.With boundaries between peoples more fraught and permeable than ever, Reading Across Borders gently urges readers to keep in mind that behind every border are real people, searching through their languages and stories for ways to belong. This belongingness cannot be captured in a singular identity. In a world shaped by forced migration, xenophobia, and watertight boundaries of language and belonging, Fani’s narrative depicts how literature both soothes and inflames these tensions. The book honours the individual and collective human struggles behind these movements of rivalries and reconciliations that give any national literature its true essence.”
—Muneer Ahmed is a Senior Researcher, Centre for Internal and Regional Security (IReS), Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS). As an area studies expert, he contributes through his work on the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, Pakist