This paper explores the emotional significance and historical interpretation of tokens left at Lo... more This paper explores the emotional significance and historical interpretation of tokens left at London’s Foundling Hospital (1741–1760) as symbols of maternal attachment and the complex social dynamics surrounding child abandonment. Inspired by the Proustian notion of objects as vessels of memory, the study examines how these tokens—small, often mundane items left with infants to ensure future identification—encode sentiments of grief, loss, and social displacement. Building on John Styles' assertion that objects possess an emotional language, the analysis highlights the poignant messages embedded in textiles, ribbons, coins, amulets, and other tokens, underscoring how mothers navigated poverty, stigma, and parental affection within the confines of societal expectations. The paper further considers recent historiographic debates on the agency of the poor, discussing how these tokens, while underscoring strategies for social assistance, also reveal the emotional weight of abandonment and loss. This study contributes to the broader history of emotions by examining the foundling tokens as evocative artifacts, resonant with the collective memory of 18th-century London’s marginalized mothers and children.
This paper examines the Andalusian "city elegy" (rithāʾ al-mudun) as a poetic response to the los... more This paper examines the Andalusian "city elegy" (rithāʾ al-mudun) as a poetic response to the loss of Al-Andalus, a symbol of cultural renaissance under Moorish rule, where scholars and poets like Ibn Zaydūn, Ibn Ḥazm, and Maḥmūd Dawīsh portray a blend of nostalgia, loss, and identity through literature. Al-Andalus, for these poets, symbolizes a paradise lost—a historical and cultural utopia whose memory evokes both a collective and individual sense of exile. Through rithāʾ al-mudun, poets engage with the Andalusian chronotope, a concept explored through Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory of "time-space," where history and poetry intersect as expressions of displacement. This essay further connects the Andalusian city elegy to the broader traditions of city laments, like the Greek elegies of Constantinople and the Urdu shahr-āshob, emphasizing the mutability of literary spaces across history. Poets from Andalusia not only recall physical landscapes but infuse them with layers of personal and communal identity, remaking history into a "memory palace" where grief and beauty intertwine. Ultimately, this study explores the Andalusian elegy as an act of remembrance rather than historical documentation, an artifact of historical poetics where loss and memory are preserved and continuously reimagined through literary forms.
This paper explores the emotional significance and historical interpretation of tokens left at Lo... more This paper explores the emotional significance and historical interpretation of tokens left at London’s Foundling Hospital (1741–1760) as symbols of maternal attachment and the complex social dynamics surrounding child abandonment. Inspired by the Proustian notion of objects as vessels of memory, the study examines how these tokens—small, often mundane items left with infants to ensure future identification—encode sentiments of grief, loss, and social displacement. Building on John Styles' assertion that objects possess an emotional language, the analysis highlights the poignant messages embedded in textiles, ribbons, coins, amulets, and other tokens, underscoring how mothers navigated poverty, stigma, and parental affection within the confines of societal expectations. The paper further considers recent historiographic debates on the agency of the poor, discussing how these tokens, while underscoring strategies for social assistance, also reveal the emotional weight of abandonment and loss. This study contributes to the broader history of emotions by examining the foundling tokens as evocative artifacts, resonant with the collective memory of 18th-century London’s marginalized mothers and children.
This paper examines the Andalusian "city elegy" (rithāʾ al-mudun) as a poetic response to the los... more This paper examines the Andalusian "city elegy" (rithāʾ al-mudun) as a poetic response to the loss of Al-Andalus, a symbol of cultural renaissance under Moorish rule, where scholars and poets like Ibn Zaydūn, Ibn Ḥazm, and Maḥmūd Dawīsh portray a blend of nostalgia, loss, and identity through literature. Al-Andalus, for these poets, symbolizes a paradise lost—a historical and cultural utopia whose memory evokes both a collective and individual sense of exile. Through rithāʾ al-mudun, poets engage with the Andalusian chronotope, a concept explored through Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory of "time-space," where history and poetry intersect as expressions of displacement. This essay further connects the Andalusian city elegy to the broader traditions of city laments, like the Greek elegies of Constantinople and the Urdu shahr-āshob, emphasizing the mutability of literary spaces across history. Poets from Andalusia not only recall physical landscapes but infuse them with layers of personal and communal identity, remaking history into a "memory palace" where grief and beauty intertwine. Ultimately, this study explores the Andalusian elegy as an act of remembrance rather than historical documentation, an artifact of historical poetics where loss and memory are preserved and continuously reimagined through literary forms.
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Papers by Tasneem Khan