What Travels When People Don’t?

This seminar will be presented by Arezou Azad, who will offer an original perspective on the Silk Roads through a study of the Bamiyan Papers. By focusing on everyday documents rather than solely on travelers and traded goods, she will shed light on the practices, institutions, and networks that enabled movement and exchange across the medieval Islamic world.

"This talk examines Germany’s long-standing fascination with Indigenous peoples of North America—what scholar Hartmut Lutz calls “Indianthusiasm”. The concept, largely based on the late 19th Century German writer, Karl May and his Winnetou adventure novels (1893) has produced a powerful but largely imagined figure known as the "Indianer". Rather than representing real Indigenous peoples, the "Indianer" is a German cultural construct shaped by romanticism, nationalism, and fantasy. Through a cultural-historical reading of the "Indianer" phenomenon, I argue that German representations of Indigenous peoples reveal far more about German cultural desires and anxieties than about Indigenous realities- past or present. The "Indianer" became a symbol through which Germans imagined freedom, authenticity, closeness to nature, and resistance to modernity. This fascination developed largely independent of direct colonial encounters and became deeply embedded in German literature, film, festivals, and popular culture. The particular interest is on contemporary Indigenous interventions which have transformed Germany’s long-standing fascination with the "Indianer" into a productive site of critique and dialogue. Rather than simply rejecting German representations of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous artists use these representations as opportunities for what Gerald Vizenor calls Native survivance: active Indigenous presence, resistance, and self-representation."

• Arezou Azad is a historian of the premodern Islamicate East (Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia), specialising in the period from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. She is a member of the Centre de recherche sur le monde iranien and holds the Chair in the Arts and Heritage of Afghanistan at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. She also directs the Invisible East programme.
• Discussant: Mahya Tooranpoor is a PhD candidate in Islamic Architecture at Tabriz Islamic Art University, Iran. Her research focuses on the history of Iranian architecture and foundational questions in historical manuscripts. As a visiting researcher invited by Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, she explores architectural knowledge transmission in Islamic contexts. She is also passionate about photography and has participated in group exhibitions in Tehran, Iran.