The theme of this panel is national identity formation in twentieth century Iran; its focus is on the selective politics of staging a national body in various cultural productions. Embedded in this (bio)politics was also a continuous (and contested) staging of urban spaces and the location of the subject of Iranian modernity. The panel will address these developments in literature, cinema, dance and visual representations of the period covering, roughly, the years between 1920's and 1970's.
The cinematic focus of this investigation emphasizes the role of Iranian cinema in 1970s in crafting a vernacular cosmopolitanism in Tehran, highlighting Tehran International Film Festival (TIFF), as a space that annexed the global into the local context. Being informed of the multiplicity of everyday life on the streets, TIFF facilitated the re-staging of Tehran as a space that was simultaneously vernacular and cosmopolitan. Through an investigation of visual narratives that advertised a mode of being in a spatial configuration deemed modern, a similar development is traced in the popular graphic representations of modern subjects and spaces. Rather than perceiving this visual phenomenon through the lens of stylistic shifts or borrowings, alternative engagements with space and subject are investigated as formative of ocular discourses of modernity. Similarly, the performative aspect of modern subject/nation will be examined through an investigation of a staged national dancer. The regulating strategies through which the national dancing subject was constructed drew on the aesthetic and ideological discourses of Iranian nationalism and gender modernity, eliminating the "inferior" dancing body of a transvestite zan-push, inventing an ideal female performing body. Finally, two distinct but complimentary developments in literature will be addressed. Firdowsi Millennium Cogress, held in Tehran in 1934, aspired toward an international event by inviting notable Orientalist scholars and Iranian intellectuals. It is theorized that, informed by Orientalist understandings of nation and identity, the congress contributed to the formation of a discourse on national identity which projected the epitome of "Iranian-ness" onto the person of Firdowsi (the national poet), a concept which was later deployed on popular, intellectual and international levels. The second literary development witnessed the emergence, in popular novels, of two archetypal figures which corporealized the split in the national body. These subjects of Iranian modernity, perceived as tradition and modernity, and their continual disciplining and counter-disciplining, along with their associations with rural or urban loci, became the site of a contestation on national identity formation.
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Mr. Hamid Rezaeiyazdi
Literary modernity in Iran is traditionally believed to have two alternative “advents.” One such moment is attributed to Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh’s (1892-1997) preface to Yaki Bud u Yaki Nabud (Once Upon a Time) published in 1921. The other moment is ascribed to the publication by Sadeq Hedayat (1902-1951) of Buf-i Kur (The Blind Owl) in 1936. Both are held to be determining moments at which a decisive break with what is perceived as traditional modes of writing was effected. In the former case, Jamalzadeh’s prescription to set the traditional genre of “composition on the path of novel” (16) was seen as a manifesto of literary modernity. In the latter case, Hedayat’s use of surrealist narration in The Blind Owl and the novel’s explorations of individual psyche were seen as a departure from the traditional “Hekayat” (tale) and its moralist-realist persuasion. Both are, as I argue in this inquiry, historicist approaches to modernity premised on temporal hierarchy, condemning the literary modernities of non-Europe as either temporally lagging or aesthetically derivative. A genealogical approach will instead focus on adaptations of modernity. Literary modernity in Iran, I argue, is a contested process. And as an extension of its socio-cultural context, literature becomes a site for the contending narratives of “traditional” and “modernity.” As complex and contradictory as these categories are, their deployment has often been simplistic and binarsitic. Their embodiments in the Iranian novels of the period under study, however, is often overlapping and ambiguous. The two figures that incorporate these perceived polarities are those of Jahil and Fokoli. The former was held to stand for tradition while the latter was seen to represent the modern. These archetypal figures reemerge time and again in Iranian novels and their continuous disciplining and counter disciplining characterizes the narrative of Iranian identity formation, the nation, and the meaning and locus of the subject within the latter’s imagined borders. Taking my cue from the traditional temporalizations of literary modernity mentioned above, I study the generations that follow Jamalzadeh and Hedayat, stretching roughly the period between the 1920’s to the 1940’s. Due to the sheer volume of literary productions in the specified time span, only representative works have been selected for this study. By “representative” is simply meant those works that enjoyed more popularity, were more often anthologized, or appeared in more editions or “serious” studies.
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Dr. Golbarg Rekabtalaei
“Our generation is a martyred generation” claimed Masud Kimiai, a renowned Iranian film director, in an interview in 1978; “Very soon, those which we knew, recognised and had aged with, were swept away and were instead replaced by dance, car brands and jeans…we were the ones most affected by moving from [houses with large] courtyards to apartment buildings.”# Through an analysis of primary sources form pre-revolutionary Iran, this paper will contend that the Iranian cinema of the 70s—and the cultural productions and exchanges that it entailed—facilitated a cinematic cosmopolitanism that was dialogic both in its content, and in its relation to its “others.” In its relation to modernity, cinema brought tangible changes to everyday experiences and prompted alternative social practices. Ever since its public screenings in 1903, the development of cinema was tied to urban development, and the expansion of cities were in turn linked to the emergence of new public spaces such as cinemas. Movie theatres were built in urban areas that were easily accessible by mechanical forms of transportation such as tramways and streetcars, and concentrated in the most prestigious urban streets. While mediating public sentiments associated with urban development—both in content and structure—cinema itself thus became engaged in a process of urban cosmopolitanism.
This paper implements a historiographical view to explore the cinematic developments of pre-revolutionary Iran in facilitating the emergence of multiple publics through competing representations of Iranian modernity. Focusing on the Tehran International Film Festival (1972-1977), this study suggests that the cinema of the time, being informed of the international cinema, facilitated the crafting of a vernacular cosmopolitanism that was manifest in the festival as well as the films of the period. In other words, annexing of the global into the local context of Iran, the festival functioned to stage Tehran as a vernacular urban space on a global level. The Tehran Festival was especially organised in such a way that would engage large numbers of people from the various areas of Tehran in the shaping of an inclusionary and diversified cosmopolitan cinematic culture in the capital city. The films showcased at Tehran International Film Festival, too, worked to shape the popular imagination within the context of a globally embedded everyday life; so that the festival functioned as the basis of the plurality of imagined worlds—a plural space in which the self could be re-imagined and re-staged on a global level.
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Ms. Shabnam Rahimi-Golkhandan
The objective of this study is to locate and historicize the basic visual components of the idealized figure of the nation/subject to understand the ways in which the discourse of modernity and the construction of nation is represented and consumed in the formative stages of graphic design in Iran. For the purpose of such visual analysis in this study, advertisement is understood as a visual narrative constructed based on an idea of the future with the power to persuade its viewer into action and/or consumption. In other words, advertisement and its relation to space and subject formation is itself defined as an analytical category. Such definition of advertisement is argued to be crucial in the understanding of the transformation of the language of graphic design in Iran that is embedded in the discourse of modernization/modernity.
The theoretical engagement is with the notions of stylistic arrangement of artistic modernity that are temporal and devoid of historiographical specificity. This paper proposes that, instead of stylistic shifts or borrowings, it is the different modes of engagement with space and subject that mark the decisive shifts of paradigm in the artistic production. This alternative vision of renewal will therefore not be achieved in temporal relation to present or retrospectively – as stylistic categorization often is – but rather rooted in narration of a history, re-imagined.
The three newspapers of Mulla Nasr Al-Din, Nahid, Iran-e Bastan, and Iran-e Emrooz, that form the primary sources of this inquiry, are sampled based both on the breadth of visual strategies used in these publications and the time period they cover. The choice itself does not necessarily imply that these publications are chosen as the representatives of the diverse range of visual publications of the time. It is however, understood and argued that there are fundamental strategies – both formal and contextual – that is shared between them. As such, these basic visual formulations can be shown to correspond to the prevalent socio-political discourse of the time and thus traced in other contemporaneous publications as well. The paper thus aims to highlight the instability of the constructed categories of nation, national subject/space and progress/modernity.
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Ms. Ida Meftahi
The proposed paper offers a genealogy of the Iranian ‘high art’ theatrical dance genre, known as “national dance” (raqs-i milli), and explores the ways in which the female national dancer was constructed to present an ideal modern Iranian woman on stage. Invented in the 20th century in an emerging nationalist performing arts context, raqs-i milli is a modern choreographic genre which often claims an authentic past. Encompassing change and continuity, the choreographic works in this genre have often been constructed through the innovative use of ideas, movements and aesthetics throughout the 20th century.
The public (modern) dancing body was exposed in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century, when, with the development of urban public life, new hetero-social sites of sociability were created in large cities of Iran. The influence of European theatrical dance culture, along with the rise of nationalism in Iran and the support of the Pahlavi government, fostered the development of the new artistic genre of national dance, in which the dancing body’s appearance and actions were “purified” from those negative characteristics associated with the corrupt entertainment dance scene. The national dancer sought to portray her “modern” Iranian identity through the newly-invented “authentic” medium of raqs-i milli and manifested the bio-ideology of the Pahlavi state, an ideology that sought to recover Iran’s glorious ancient past as it leaped forward towards a “great civilization” (tamaddun-i buzurg).
This paper explores the dancing body on the public stage in the nationalist milieu of Iran in early 20th century, when it was performed as part of the theatrical environment, and after the mid- 1940s, when dance gained an independent status. While the nationalist biopolitics that regulated the stage also shaped the staged dancing subject, the common dance-related intellectual trends influenced the aesthetics of national. Examining the national dancer, this paper explores how the high-art dancer of raqs-i milli dissociated with the image of its contemporaneous dancing subject of the popular scene of cabaret, raqqas, and its traditional counterpart, bachah- raqqas, in her regulated representation of her female sexuality (or femininity). Finally, this article explores the invention of this dance genre as a nationalist product, and the ways in which the female national dancers of this genre embody the ideas, aesthetics and ethics of Iranian nationalism and modernity.
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Ms. John Good
Following the characterization of Iran as a dying, old motherland and the urgency of her revival in the course of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909, a nationalistic movement was formed in Iran which continued through the Pahlavi period (1925-1979). The reformation of Iran as a “rejuvenating Aryan nation” through a call for returning to the glorious pre-Islamic past was the main theme of this nationalistic movement, and was therefore on the top of the cultural and political agenda of the first Pahlavi regime (1925-1941). For the implementation of this agenda, a number of historical figures, such as Persian kings, philosophers and poets were monumentalized. Among these figures was Firdawsi, the eleventh century Persian poet who recounted the history of ancient Iran from its origins through to the Arab invasion (643 CE) in his long epic, Shahnamah – that was recognized as the documentation of Iranian national identity. The renovation of Firdawsi’s mausoleum and the planning of the Firdawsi Millennium Congress were the most important steps taken by the government in monumentalizing Firdawsi on the millennial anniversary of his birth (1934). The Firdawsi millennium celebration was brilliantly planned to engage both the public and the intellectuals in the Iranian nationalistic movement. While the public was engaged in raising funds for the renovation of Firdawsi’s mausoleum and the expenses of the congress, the intellectuals were involved in the scholarly activities, such as organizing the Firdawsi Millennium Congress and giving lectures in this event. The hallmark of this congress was the participation of a considerable number of leading Orientalist scholars from different countries. The congress also served as the moment of the redefinition of Orientalism. More specifically, the founders of the congress utilized Orientalism in its Sa’idian sense – which is a tool for the promotion of the colonial interests — for the enforcement of particularistic agendas, which subsequently helped to create a new sense of Iranian national identity in the modern world. This paper investigates the planning of the Firdawsi Millennium Congress and its impacts on the redefinition of the Iranian national identity.
