Power to the poetry: Floating feathers of how to exhibit Islamically

Abstract

Discourses of preservation emphasize the physical maintenance, access to, dissemination, and restitution of works deemed to have scientific, historical, and/or cultural value. Yet categorizations of value, as well as the discourses framing the circulation and display of objects, are themselves never neutral. In content, genre, and rhetoric, they reflect the interests of modern beneficiaries and help construct circuits of fungible capital. Countering this norm, this contribution suggests that decolonization requires not only material interventions in systems of object preservation, but also discursive and epistemic interventions that learn from, rather than describe, source cultures. Inspired by the description of galleries in Persian-language Islamic poetry between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, this contribution explores how practices of preservation and museal display that emerged during universalist, Eurocentric modernity might be reconsidered through a premodern Islamic episteme. Recognizing the expressive primacy of verse in Islamic thought, it engages with the poetic tradition less as an observer than as a transcultural, transtemporal participant. Focusing on the allegorical meaning attributed to a single feather, it rethinks the role of pleasure, longing, and dissatisfaction in articulating the meaning of objects. Structured through iambic pentameter and hendecasyllabic metres harkening to premodern Latin education in Europe, the text deploys formats of reference and citation common in contemporary academic prose. It thus modifies a transcultural and premodern discursive medium with modern conventions of attribution and documentation.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. History and Anthropology, 2026 · DOI ↗