Emerging in the early twentieth century, the “modern girl” was a global typecast with distinctive hairstyle, fashion, and attitude. This stereotypical image of the modern girl made an appearance in cities and the press across the Middle East and North Africa, but its emergence and depictions in twentieth century Iran has rarely been examined. While some in cultural milieus condoned her emergence as a symbol of modernity, others censured the modern girl and her representations for “imitating” the west and fostering decadence. By tracing the cinematic representations of this typecast in an urbanizing Iran, this paper explores the competing discourses that shaped modern womanhood in the first half of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, interactions and exchanges between a smorgasbord of ethnic, religious, and political communities shaped an urban cosmopolitan culture in cities, most notably in the city of Tehran. Newspapers, photography, cinema, gramophone, and radio, not only reified this heterogeneous culture, but also redefined it in a rapidly changing society. In this context, competing models of modern life emerged that worked to shape and reshape modern Iranian subjects. The urban modern girl, now becoming a more visible member of the society, was subjected to competing discourses that envisaged her place in the public sphere, as she negotiated her own identity in the city. Investigating the representations of this nascent category in film and print culture from the 1900s to 1950s, I demonstrate how the modern girl came to symbolize urban contestations, as she exemplified the city’s freedoms and limitations to reshape oneself and one’s future. By no means a homogeneous figure, the modern girl drew on the opportunities that cities such as Tehran presented to refashion herself into an urban figure with a unique sense of style.

In 1941 the Soviet Union invaded northern Iran and remained there as an occupying force through 1946. During this time, the Soviets not only pursued their military interests, but worked to strengthen socialist movements in Iran. Notably, Soviet Azerbaijani officials sought to influence Iranian Azerbaijani politics and culture, promoting Soviet sensibilities about nationalities among their southern brethren. Shortly after the Soviet occupation, a contingent of Soviet Azerbaijani artists took up residence in Tabriz, took over the theater, and started supplying movie houses with Soviet films. In this paper I will investigate the role of nationality and ethnicity in both Iranian and Soviet Azerbaijani identity formation by considering the failures and successes of the Soviet Azerbaijani project of defining Azerbaijan during the 1940s. This project contributed to the short-lived Azerbaijan People’s Government (1945-1946), but ultimately did not create common identities across the two Azerbaijans that, after a century of separation, had developed independently. I will look at the Azerbaijani plays and operas performed during the occupation, notably early-20th century works by artists such as Uzeyir Hajibeyov, which often featured Iranian settings and characters, and the work of the writer Suleyman Rustam, who recounts his leadership of the Soviet artists in Tabriz in a series of memoirs and whose poetic drama Qachaq Nebi is set during the Russian imperial era and takes place partly in northern Iran. I will then look at some of the representation of Iranian Azerbaijan in Soviet films, notably The Other Side of the Aras’s Arabic Script (1945), a short film about the continued use of Arabic script for the Azeri language in Iran, presented in contrast to Soviet Azerbaijan’s alphabet reform from Arabic to Latin and then Cyrillic, and The Other Side of the Aras (1947), a dramatization of the Azerbaijan People’s Government. Using these sources, I will analyze how performance promoted an Azerbaijani national identity that took root in Soviet Azerbaijan, how Soviet Azerbaijani figures attempted to promote this identity in Iran, and how ultimately two Azerbaijan’s, intimately linked but distinct, continued their separate trajectories.

This paper examines the sudden commonality of blackface theater, or siyah-bazi,in public spaces across Iran during the Pahlavi era. While minstrelsy originally began as a mimicry of enslaved black eunuchs and was generally limited to the privacy of the royal court, blackface theater expanded rapidly in the mid-twentieth century and was entrenched as a type of folk theater across various forms of media. The timing of the minstrelsy’s popularity in Iran is particularly interesting and strange: it spread in the decades after abolition in 1929, when Iran’s history of slavery was being actively erased in the public sphere. The narrative around siyah-bazi, a practice that emerged directly out of the racial hierarchies of slavery, was eventually reconceptualized as a folk practice independent of its sordid past. Even though the blackening of one’s face, the accented pidgin Persian, the simple clothes, the sexualized plotlines, and the classed roles all directly came from impersonating interactions between enslaved peoples and their slavers, siyah-bazi was merely presented and accepted as a satirical tradition of political and social commentary. This paper investigates how siyah-baziduring the Pahlavi era developed from a niche royal form of entertainment to print, theater, and televised programming with a national audience. Through an examination of satirical magazines, memoirs, and, of course, the plays themselves, this paper contextualizes the history of siyah-bazi and minstrelsy in Iran as one that both maintained the racial legacies of slavery while erasing explicit references to it.

Iranian theatre has long been a fertile ground for interrogating issues of gender and women’s rights. Strains of these conversations are embedded within Iran’s pre-Western theatrical forms, then they were taken up as central themes by the country’s “Golden Age” of playwrights in the 1950s-70s, and they are at the heart of much of the work by Iran’s first post-revolutionary generation of writers (Mohammad Charmshir, Hamid Amjad, Mohammad Rahmanian, etc.). Strangely enough, despite this continued infatuation with critical discussions about gender and women’s rights in the Iranian theatre, very little space has been given in these conversations to the thoughts and work of female-identifying artists. Directors like Pari Saberi and Manijeh Mohamedi are the rare exceptions to the rule, but female playwrights in Iran have struggled to attain a similar level of cultural capital. Over the past ten years, Naghmeh Samini has been at the forefront of a growing movement of Iranian women playwrights, and her work has paved the way for female-driven theatrical narratives that actually emerge from female voices. With the viral success of her television series Shahrzad, she has become a major figure in the Iranian entertainment industry, but her stage work continues to ponder Iranian womanhood on a more intimate level. This paper interrogates the work of Naghmeh Samini, with special attention paid to her latest play, Bacheh. The piece tells the story of three women—one Kurdish, one Afghani, and one Libyan, all named Mina—who are being interrogated by an immigration officer regarding their alleged relationship to a newborn baby in the encampment. All of the women deny giving birth to the child, and they tell stories of their tumultuous journeys getting there. With this play, I argue that Samini locates womanhood in relation to maternalism, but advocates for a narrative of women’s rights outside the bounds of one’s connection to bearing children (and what’s more, one’s racial identity as Iranian). In doing so, she turns the performance event into a utopic space where categories of otherness are challenged, allowing for a radical reframing of who qualifies as an Iranian citizen.