Abstract
Inspired by the innovations witnessed in the protest chants of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and in the 2009 post-election protests in Iran, this paper engages in a comparative analysis of Iranian protest- and revolutionary chants over three periods of unrest in the modern era: 1953, 1979, 2009. In studying these chants closely, the paper asks: How is the nation called into being in each period? Indeed, how is the nation re-imagined in each instance? What media, technologies and what sources are used to form the chants in each period? What is revealed in the comparisons? Since different media are utilized in each period, how do the media that transmit the chants transform their meanings and messages and how do these in turn call into being a different nation? The project, more specifically, works through the sources of the revolutionary chants of the 1979 period, the chants of the Chilean and the Cuban revolution-- as they were transformed and transmitted by the cassette tape in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and performs an analysis of appropriatory chants of the 2009 uprising (including the nightly protest call of Allah-u-Akbar from city rooftops] and their transformation of hegemonic discourses to call for a regeneration of the nation by means of social media networks and YouTube videos.
The paper, then, will be a comparative analysis of chanting as a means by which Iran as a nation is re-imagined in the modern period. While voice and chanting has been a devotional part of the tradition of nation building in particular during Muharram rituals, very little work has been done on the question of their performative technologies and media. The paper contributes not only the translation and preservation of the tradition of Iranian chanting in the modern period, it also offers a comparative analysis that suggests the ways in which the nation is reconstituted in each period of transition by means of aural analogue and digital media.
Selected Sources:
Staging Revolution Hamid Dabashi, Peter J. Chelkowski
The invention of communication Armand Mattelart
Radiotext(e) Neil Strauss, David Mandl, eds.
Personal archive of post-Iran election 2009 chants
Personal archive of posts on Twitter from the 2009 post-election period
Youtube.com and http://www.citizentube.com/
Tehran Bureau http://tehranbureau.com/iran-updates/
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