In Chapter 10, “In and out of a Homeland,” Yahya Dowlatabadi’s Hayat-e Yahya/The Life of Yahya (1893) is the subject of my close reading. Yahya Dowlatabadi was a prominent poet, calligrapher, and social activist of the Constitutional period. His posthumous autobiography, Hayat-e Yahya, is a remarkable account of his life as a revolutionary activist. His father was a representative of Yahya Sobh Azal, the successor to Bab, the founder of the revolutionary Babi movement in Iran. He delegated that authority to his son Mirza Yahya Dolatabadi, who was a revolutionary social reformist initiating serious educational reform in his homeland. Throughout his life he was either exiled or else traveled extensively in and around the Qajar and Ottoman territories and visited Istanbul, Berlin, London, and Stockholm. In his multivolume autobiography, Dowlatabadi gives a detailed account of his life and travels. What is particular about this text is the deeply involved presence of its author in the most volatile period of his homeland, and therefore his journeys are the spatial extensions of his political activism in a critical period in Iran. His presence in this constellation of travelers is crucial for us to see how there is a narrative and institutional organicity to these travelogues that places the post/colonial subject on an effervescent transnational public sphere.

In Chapter 7, “Hajj Sayyah Leads a Peripatetic Life,” I dwell on Hajj Muhammad Ali Sayyah’s Khaterat/Memoirs (1878). In his early twenties, Hajj Muhammad Ali Sayyah embarked upon a journey around the globe that would last almost two decades and take him from Iran to Central Asia, Europe, and finally to the United States, where he lives for about a decade, becomes a US citizen, and meets with President Ulysses S. Grant. What is peculiar about Hajj Sayyah’s travels is that they are decidedly global in their expanse and therefore their active formation of a non-unitary “nomadic subject.” He was about to marry his cousin and be forced into a domestic life when he decided to run away and see the world for himself. He in fact fakes his own death while still traveling in Iran, in a gesture of supreme symbolic significance, before he embarks upon his peripatetic life around the planet. He returns to his homeland a harbinger of what at the time was not even recognized as economic and cultural globalization, yet fully to be grasped and theorized decades later in the future in the age of global and differentiated mobility, when a diffuse form of nomadism will rise to define the location of multiple, integrated, and cosmopolitan subjects.