Race and the Aesthetics of Alterity in Mahshid Amirshahi’s Dadeh Qadam-Kheyr

Focusing on black women Qadam-Kheyr and Sorur in Mahshid Amirshahi’s novel Dadeh Qadam-Kheyr (1999), this article examines literary representations of the African-Iranian presence, and provides a critique of race and slavery in twentieth-century Iran. In light of the history of the Iranian slave trade until 1928, and the reconstruction of race and gender identities along Eurocentric lines of nationalism in Iran, the novel under scrutiny is a dynamic site of struggle between an “Iranian” literary discourse and its “non-Persian” Others. The “aesthetics of alterity” at the heart of the text is, therefore, the interplay between the repressed title-character Qadam-Kheyr and the resilient minor character Sorur, each registering Amirshahi’s artistic intervention into a forgotten corner of Iranian history.     

Peripherality and Humor in the Iranian Art Film

This paper examines a range of post-revolutionary Iranian art films, mostly those watched primarily outside the country via festival screenings, in the context of the relationship between the tropes of peripherality and humor. It argues for the significance and complexity of both terms in the context of this cinema and of the global image of Iran and its peoples. Having examined a kind of humor based on the geographic periphery, specifically derived from relationships between technology, car, and camera, it concludes by reflecting on the advent of new technologies, and social constraints and opportunities in the Iranian art cinema today.     

Mythological Themes in Iranian Culture and Art: Traditional and Contemporary Perspectives

In Iran, ancient mythical elements are very much alive in the present as a part of the fabric of ordinary people's lives and worldview. This paper explores the relationship between culture, myth, and artistic production in contemporary Iran, using the specific examples of symbols and mythological themes evoked in the work of painter/writer Aydin Aghdashloo and photographer/video artist Shirin Neshat. The paintings of Aghdashloo, in which he deliberately damages beautifully-executed classical style Persian miniatures, convey a sense that the angelic forces have failed and that the world is succumbing to the destructive and degenerative activities of the demonic. The photographs, videos and installations of Neshat likewise draw heavily on cultic forms inherited from ancient Iranian tradition. It is important to note that in none of these cases does the artist use mythological themes and symbols to express their original cultural meaning; rather, they appropriate well-known elements of ancient Iranian culture and imbue them with new meanings relevant to contemporary issues and understandings. What these examples do illustrate is the persistent resonance of ancient Iranian culture among Iranians up to the present day. Iranian artists have demonstrated the effectiveness of evoking their target audience's deep sense of cultural identity to convey contemporary messages using ancient cultural concepts, sometimes on a subconscious level.     

Performing Trans in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Gender Transitions in Islamic Law,Theatre, and Film

In the wake of a string of sensationalist documentaries about transsexuality in Iran, Iranian theatre and film artists began crafting groundbreaking trans performances to educate audiences and depict characters living non-heteronormative lives without the translating influence of queer theory or identity politics. Investigating transsexual bodies as assembled by jurists in Iranian Shi?a jurisprudence and by artists on stage and screen reveals the ways in which the transsexual body is constructed in Islamic legal discourse and represented in narrative and bodily form in the public imaginary in Iran. Representations of transsexuality in theatre and film highlight the role of the arts as a vehicle for social change, communal recognition, and self-cognition. In particular, performances of female-to-male gender transitions in theatre and film have expanded the boundaries of how gender presentation is translated onto Iranian stages, into Tehran coffeehouses, and onto global screens. These trans performances usher Iranian spectators into new forms of viewership and artistic consumption in their attempt to creatively represent transsexual bodies and narratives to increase tolerance towards transsexuals; further, they have ignited a conversation among artists and activists about the assemblage of transsexual bodies in artistic productions and the most effective narrative and emotional forms of catharsis to inspire change.     

From Evangelizing to Modernizing Iranians: The American Presbyterian Mission and its Iranian Students1

This article examines the American Presbyterian education project in Iran from the early nineteenth century to 1940. While most literature on the subject concerns Iranian state-missionary relations and Presbyterian boys' schools in Iran, this article seeks to address the interactions between American Presbyterians, the Iranian state, and students and families of Iranian girls' schools. A study of the Presbyterians' flagship girls' school in Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh and its sixty-six-year history reveals missionary intentions, tactics, and accomplishments, as well as the adaptations and accommodations pressed upon them by the Iranians they served. Despite the school's promotion of modern American norms and Christian teachings, the young graduates of Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh developed a strong sense of loyalty to both Iran and Islam, thus turning an evangelist mission into an important feature of the construction of Iranian nationalism and modernity.     

The German Argentines between Nazism and Nationalism: The Patagonia Plot of 1939

Abstract

When seizing control of the US embassy In Tehran in November 1979 during the Iranian revolution, militant students not only took sixty-one US citizens hostage, but also captured thousands of pages of official documents. During the 1980s, they published seventy-seven volumes of selections in order to prove to the world that the United States had colluded with the Pahlavi regime, and to discredit Iranian moderates by revealing their former ties to US officials. In keeping with the militants' perception of the embassy's role in Iran's domestic politics, they entitled the publications Documents from the US Espionage Den (Asnad-i Lanah-yi Jasusi).¹ Surprisingly, among the papers published is one by Harvard University anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer entitled ‘Religion and Progress in Iran’, apparently written for a state department colloquium on Iran held on 25 May 1979. In the introduction, Fischer characterizes the Islamic Republic as a ‘challenge to modernization theory’: ‘Iran has been a major test case for modernization theory throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was the case where the constraint of capital was theoretically removed, and therefore the case where transformation from the third world into the first world was expected to be most feasible.’²     

Nuclear Iran is Not an Option: A new negotiating strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons

The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1¹ over Tehran's nuclear enrichment activities have not only failed to reach an agreement but have brought Iran much closer to the threshold of mastering the technology to produce nuclear weapons. There are many factors that precipitated this breakdown, including the West's inability to understand and deal with the Iranian psychological disposition, the failure to present to Iran the severity of the punitive measures that could be inflicted as a consequence of their defiance, and the US administration's misleading policy that gave Iran the room to maneuver. There is an urgent need to adopt a distinctively new strategy toward Iran consisting of three tracks of separate but interconnected negotiations: The first should focus on the current negotiations on Iran's enrichment program and the economic incentive package; the second should concentrate on regional security and the consequences of continued Iranian defiance; and the third track should address Iran's and the United States' grievances against each other. The United States must initiate all three tracks without which future talks will be as elusive as the previous negotiations, except this time the West and Israel will be facing the unsettling prospect of a nuclear Iran.     

Whatever Happened to The Little Black Fish?

This essay uses retranslation studies to trace the defanging and domestication of Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish, a children’s story once hailed as a major revolutionary and literary text. Behrangi’s book is the only modern Iranian prose work to have been translated multiple times both before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The study compares the texts from several of these retranslations, by considering whether they have been domesticated for their English readers, as well as their context, by looking at the cultural impact of such factors as the Islamic Revolution and US?Iran relations. It looks at how various translators and publishers have interpreted the story and how their perspectives reflect Iranian history, the influence of Middle East studies, and the interests of the Iranian diaspora. The result sheds light on translation norms, as well as on the circulation and interpretation of Iranian literature in the global context.     

Iranian Studies in the United Kingdom in the Twentieth Century

This essay provides a general introductory survey of Iranian and Iran-related studies in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century (including languages, literature, and the arts), with a very brief preliminary foray into earlier Iran-related scholarship and wide-ranging imaginations of Iran in Britain and Ireland, as well as some concluding remarks on contemporary knowledge production about Britain in Iran. Among other themes covered in the essay are the varied contributions of non-Britons and non-Irish to Iran-related scholarship and imaginations in the United Kingdom, underscoring the overall transnational production, dissemination, reception, and utilization of knowledge (history, geography, archaeology, cultures, ethnography and anthropology, art and architecture, Iran-related Persian-language literatures and poetry, etc.). In particular, the essay highlights the contributions made by individuals from, and institutions in, the Indian subcontinent to “British” scholarship and knowledge about Iran.     

Reading Iran: American Academics and the Last Shah

Despite the nature of American influence in postwar Iran, and despite the fact that Iranian studies has grown into a flourishing field in the United States, scholars have not explored the field's origins during the Cold War era. This article begins with the life of T. Cuyler Young to trace the critical genealogy within the field as it developed, in cooperation between American and Iranian scholars, during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It proceeds to analyze two cohorts of American scholars whose political inclinations ranged from liberal reformism to revolutionary Marxism. As revolutionary momentum swelled in Iran in the late 1970s, critical scholars broke through superpower dogmas and envisioned a post-shah Iran. However, Cold War teleologies prevented them from fully grasping Iranian realities, particularly Khomeini's vision for Iran. This article argues that the modern field of Iranian studies in the United States was shaped by multiple generations of critical voices, all of which were informed by historically situated encounters with Iran and expressed through a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives.     

The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Post‐Revolutionary Iran

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the fortunes of the pre‐revolutionary, Pahlavi nationalist narrative in post‐revolutionary Iran. The study analyses and compares pre‐ and post‐revolutionary school textbooks with the aim of demonstrating that, for all its revolutionary and Islamic‐universalist hyperbole, the Islamic Republic of Iran remained committed to the Pahlavi dynasty's conception of the ‘immemorial Iranian nation’ (or the ‘Aryan hypothesis’) as it was first articulated by European scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Post‐revolutionary Iran clung to the European/Pahlavi master narrative of Iranian history, its very basic ‘story line’. It was, therefore, subject to the same evolution, the same dialectic of remembering and forgetting, the same successive deformations, and the vulnerability to the very same manipulation and appropriation. This study, then, attempts to establish that the Islamic Republic's apparent shift from ‘Iran Time’ to ‘Islam Time’, though it reaches far beyond Iranian borders, nevertheless remains wedded to, and embedded in, the dominant European, secular traditions of the Pahlavi era. Islamic consciousness in Iran does not in any way constitute the basis for an alternative myth to the national myth. Rather, it adds Islamic terminology to the very same myth. Political Islam thus remains within the confines of Iranian nationalism. It is articulated in the framework of the symbols of Iranian nationalism, endowing them with a meaning that is supposedly religious.     

The Question of Identity vis-à-vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian Art

This essay explores two primary concerns in the art and artistic practice of contemporary Iran, namely “identity” (i.e. local, historical, imagined and collective identity and also self-identity) and “exoticism” (which appears inevitably related to the first), both of which (identity and exoticism) involve challenges relating to the “self” and “other” and the issue of “expectation”. It suggests that these issues see broader contextual socio-political parallels. The first apprehension relates to the concept of identity which addresses how artists have interpreted contemporary aesthetics in the light of national and indigenous ideology. The second refers to the ever-present obsession with cultural and frequently social concern with which Iranian artists are engaged within the country. The two concerns are integrated, in the way that the second is seen to be the outcome of the first. Some critiques are based on the issues of cultural commodification, anti-canonical West, cultural formulation, and also the stereotypes rooted in the preference and interest of the market.     

Reform Transplanted: Parsi Agents of Change amongst Zoroastrians in Nineteenth-Century Iran

In the mid-nineteenth century, Parsis reestablished ties with Zoroastrians in Iran that had languished due to decades-long internal unrest in Iran. In 1854 reformists in India established the Society for the Amelioration of Conditions in Iran and sent a representative to Iran—Maneckji Hataria. Hataria was charged with eliminating the onerous non-Muslim tax owed by the Zoroastrians (the jaziyeh). Hataria also organized the Iranian Zoroastrian community, and funded a variety of community projects. He also brought Parsi reformist ideas to Iran, and attempted to reshape Iranian religious practice and belief along Parsi lines. This article explores the effects of Parsi reformist ideas on Iran, and Hataria's own writings concerning Zoroastrianism and its relationship to Iranian national identity.     

Fictive Layering and Inversion in the Paintings of Ali-Akbar Sadeghi

In Iran surrealism is spoken of by artists and critics as a living element in art, long after its popularity in Europe and North America has waned. This article explores key features of the work of one of the most prolific contemporary Iranian artists, Ali-Akbar Sadeghi. While Sadeghi says that he thinks of himself as a “surrealist,” his work is distinguished from many self-professed surrealists in Iran: whereas the latter are concerned with representing metaphysical, even mystical, meanings, Sadeghi sees his art as a kind of intellectual exercise, presenting a dramatic theater in which the viewer engages in epistemological interrogation. Though Sadeghi's paintings are full of apparent references to surrealist themes and tropes from the past, here it is argued that his work is not so much a storehouse of surrealist content as a series of puzzles for the viewer to solve.     

Arab commentaries on the Iranian revolution

Muhammad as‐Sa^cid ^cAbd al‐Mu'min: Mas'ala ath‐Thawra al‐Iraniyya (The Case of the Iranian Revolution), Cairo, 1981.

Sami Dhabiyan: Iran wa al‐Khumayni: Muntalaqat ath‐Thawra wa Hudud at‐Taghyir (Iran and Khomeini: The Foundations of the Revolution and the Limits of Change), Beirut, 1979.

Ibrahim ad‐Dissuqi Shita: ath‐Thawra al‐Iraniyya: al‐Judhur‐ al‐Idilujiyya (The Iranian Revolution: The Roots‐the Ideology), Beirut, 1979.

Talal Majdhub: Iran: Min ath‐Thawra ad‐Dusturiyya hatta ath‐Thawra al‐Islamiyya (Iran: From the Constitutional Revolution to the Islamic Revolution), Beirut, 1980.

Mahmud an Najjar: ath‐Thawra al‐Iraniyya wa Ihtimalat al‐Khatar fi al‐Khalij (The Iranian Revolution and the Possibilities of Danger in the Gulf), Beirut, 1980.     

Better a Warm Hug than a Cold Bath: Nationalist Memory and the Failures of Iranian Historiography

This paper assesses the extent to which the modern historiography of Iran is indebted to a nationalist construction of Iran’s past, rather than proceeding from impartial and critical historical research. The paper pursues this aim by applying the distinction between history (as a scholarly discipline) and memory (as a nationalist construct) to one of the central tropes of the country’s historiography. According to that trope, Iranian history can be summarized as a succession of violent invasions by foreign “races,” which never stamped out Iran’s separate ethnic identity. This resilience is attributed to Iranian civilization’s inherent superiority, which Iranianized the invaders and thus ensured Iran’s survival as a primordial nation. The analysis shows that—counter-intuitively—twentieth-century Iranian historians, instead of subjecting this narrative to critical assessment, have in fact played a central role in developing it into a self-serving historiography. Special attention is given to Zarrinkub’s seminal Two Centuries of Silence.     

Imagining the Diaspora in the New Millennium Comedies of Iranian Cinema

This article examines the genre of comedy in Iranian cinema and explores the various influences on its development and growth. It demonstrates how the roots of recent comedies can be traced back to pre-Revolution commercial cinema (known as filmfarsi) as well as the traditional Iranian comic theatre of taqlid. In particular, it focuses on the depictions of the Iranian diaspora in these comedies. The Iranian diaspora has been imagined and represented frequently in modern Persian culture, often satirically and humorously. More recently, Iranian comedies have provided a new space to imagine, define, criticize and redeem the Iranian diaspora.     

Iran: Island of Stability orLand in Turmoil

Iran is a critical state in international relations because of its natural resources, its strategic location, its controversial conservative Islamic regime and its effect on shifting the balance of power in the Middle East. As a result, Iran is facing pressure from all sides. There are currently four possible future scenarios for Iran: the Iranian regime will remain stable; the Iranian regime will become increasingly unstable; the stability of the Iranian regime depends on international action; the Iranian regime will reform itself from within. It is only by improving its image, that the U.S. can positively affect any of these scenarios. Iran has historically been an essential actor in the international arena because ofits strategic location and its position as a major oil producer; Iran is currently the fourth largest producer of crude oil, the third largest holder of proven oil reserves and the second largest holder of natural gas reserves. Today, Iran remains a critical state, not only because of its strategic location and its abundance of natural resources, but also because of its alleged role as a “state sponsor of terror,” its nuclear program, its human rights abuses, its controversial conservative Islamic regime which is at odds with America, and its effect on shifting the balance of power in the Middle East, especially in light of the U.S. removal of the Taliban and Hussein regimes, two of Iran's biggest threats (Stockman, 2004). It is because of a combination of these factors that the Iranian government is feeling much pressure from all angles. Domestically, the Iranian regime is feeling pressure from the Iranian society as the regime is shifting back from a trend towards liberalism as represented by the Khatami government, towards Ahmadinejad's more conservative and traditional regime. Manifestations of this disapproval were seen in the 2007 municipal elections, in which reformers won the plurality of votes (Not Pro‐Prez or Pro‐Reform, 2006). Internationally, Iran has been accused of being a state sponsor of terror and has been labeled by the American government as a member of the “axis of evil,” and as a violator of human rights. Finally, within the regime itself, Ahmadinejad's confrontational foreign policy has caused a split within the conservative block; dividing the pragmatists who want to engage in trade and resume relations with the West, and those who adhere to a strict interpretation of the Islamic Revolution by welcoming confrontation with the West. Furthermore, tensions exist, not only between the reform minded Majlis and the conservative Council of Guardians, but also between the Majlis and the president, who has recently been criticized for his aggressive foreign policy that is isolating Iran from the world.     

The heritage ‘NGO’: a case study on the role of grass roots heritage societies in Iran and their perception of cultural heritage

This paper examines the activities of a group of heritage enthusiasts in Iran. Grass roots heritage activism is a relatively recent phenomenon that appeared in Iran since the late 1990s. They are increasingly operating collectively as cultural or heritage NGOs. They have diverse socio-economic origins and political views. However, as this paper argues, they share a common ground in their activities; one that maintains an ambivalent and critical relationship with the state and official definitions of heritage and identity. Referring to interview and other data collected during fieldwork in Iran, this paper traces and analyses the contours of that common ground and argues that there is a nascent heritage movement in the country. The impact and contribution of these emerging and self-reflective heritage movements to Iranian identity, which is reflected in their embracing of diversity and the notion of historical continuity, reveal the dynamism and complexity of the cultural and political landscape of contemporary Iranian society. They also reveal the importance of generating further scholarship in the field of Iranian cultural heritage. In conceptualising the characteristics of a nascent heritage movement in Iran, the paper makes a new contribution to the approach of existing scholarship in the broader field of heritage studies.