Australian engagements with Hafez and the ghazal tradition, the historical erasure and recovery of Afghan cameleers within national narratives, and contemporary Iranian writing on gender, identity, and displacement. 

This special issue of Southerly takes “Persia” not as a nation-state but as a civilisational field: an aesthetic, poetic, and historical zone that has circulated across languages, empires, and diasporas. Persian Passages intervenes in how Persian culture is received, translated, and reworked within contemporary Australian and global literary contexts, resisting both "exoticism" and flattening multicultural frames.

The result is a deliberately polyphonic issue that treats literary culture as an entangled system, as with all Southerly volumes, the themed section is accompanied by The Long Paddock and a selection of strong contemporary Australian writing beyond the special focus.

Edition note: Literary journal. Southerly, Volume 76, Number 3 (2016). Paperback. Themed issue.