In studying the formation of modern and ethnic roles in late-19th and early-20th-century West Asia, social historians have shown that both citizens and states regarded reforms to the external trappings of habitus-- dress, language, manners, names-- as the way to change societies’ entire mentality and moral life. The modernizers’ premise, that the trappings of performance can fundamentally reorganize subjectivity, is completely compatible with the practice of cultural history in the age of affect theory. Nonetheless, comparatively little work in Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian cultural history has considered the emergence of modern and ethno-national subjects from the vantage point of performance studies.
This panel begins to fill this gap by examining the various elements surrounding performances of ethnic and cultural identities across the 19th and 20th century Persianate world. Particularly rich vocabularies for discussing the negotiation of identity as performance have emerged from African/African-American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Our comparative perspective on the Persianate case will make use of concepts such as minstrelsy, passing, camp, and drag to explore how post-Persianate identities emerged through repeated refinement of performance repertories. In “reading” the cultural texts under examination, the papers in this panel make use of tools from cultural anthropology, using thick description to delineate these performances’ gestural and material elements: gift-giving, costumes, impersonations, etc. Presentations of human gifts, in contexts of tribute, marriage, and servitude, play an important role throughout, as they bring into focus the ways that new subjectivities emerged in objectification or self-objectification, and the mutual entanglement of newly demarcated racial, ethnic, and gendered performance repertories. The papers will also show how new forms and genres such as photography, memoir, and stenographic transcript not only documented but defined the meaning of these performed roles. All four papers involve Iran, but all extend beyond it through circuits of slave trade, revolution, and cultural diplomacy.
The first two papers of the panel deal with cases of identity performance connected with class in Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran, while the third and fourth papers both explore Persian identity as a site for ethnic drag in the early Soviet Union. In the first pair, the performance of ethnic and racial identities contribute to the commodification of people or allow them to renegotiate their social position, while in the second pair, boundaries between unmarked Russian and marked “national” identities are alternately demarcated and permeated in performance.
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In nineteenth-century Qajar Iran, it was somewhat commonplace to give a slave as a gift. This was both a show of power and a way to garner favor – the act of giving a slave as a gift not wholly dissimilar to solidifying a political bond through marriage. Through this act of gift giving, the object becomes something other than what it was initially, by performing a particular role designated by the nature of the gift. I will place the concepts of gift-giving, performativity, and becoming in conversation with one another, be it through marriage or the giving of slaves and/or domestics as gifts, arguing that the affects surrounding the performances of the good wife, good mistress, and good and faithful servant/slave were quite similar across ethnic and racial boundaries. Yet, while the roles being performed across ethnic and racial boundaries were similar, the differences in affects surrounding the performances and processes of becoming are manifold – different reactions to races and ethnicities come to the fore when these similar performances are examined. While there has recently been more scholarship on slavery and domesticity in Iran, these questions of affect and performativity, which can give greater insight into the racial and ethnic dimensions of servitude, have yet to be addressed.
Through examining memoirs from nineteenth century Iran, along with marriage contracts and wills, in which slaves and servants were often included, this paper will ultimately ask the question: how did performances of various domestic roles, and the responses to those performances, say about perceived ethnic and racial differences? Also, what language is used in the feelings and affects surrounding giving or buying and/or selling slaves, servants, or royal women, and their processes of becoming servants or wives? How do non-royal women “pass” as royal, or embody becoming royal? I will also explore how the language surrounding slavery and domesticity in regards to race changed over time, transforming, to an extent, the meaning of race itself in the context of who counted as a slave versus simply a domestic servant, in other words, racializing race. While processes of performing various roles were intimately tied to becoming more powerful in spaces of domesticity, regardless of race, race and ethnicity still figured heavily into perceptions of power and influence.
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Dr. Mira Xenia Schwerda
In photographic portraits the choice of clothing can signify the social and cultural background, status, class, political affiliation, and ethnicity of the depicted person as well as their personal attitudes. Clothing had meaning and was therefore carefully selected. The performance of being photographed included the aspect of self-enactment and the self-fashioning of identity. In certain instances the camera also allowed the portrayed to perform a transgression of norms and rules, which would not have been acceptable in the public.
In late 19th-century Iran the advent of commercial photography introduced staged and costumed photographs, where sometimes the same actors played different ethnic or gender roles, indicated by costume and accessories. These photographs would often be reproduced with different captions, thereby changing the interpretation of the photograph.
In the global, connected, and mobile world of the 19th century and early 20th century the reproduction and interpretation of the photographs or prints made after the original photographs in the foreign press and in books then also impacted the image and the self-image of the Iranians of that time.
In my paper I will discuss these different groups of images and the importance of dress and costume in such photographic portraiture alongside written and other visual sources, specifically emphasizing instances of creation of new identities through dress.
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Mr. Rustin Zarkar
On the 18th of May, 1920, the 11th Red Army, which had recently departed from Baku, landed in Anzali and was welcomed by members of the Jangali movement led by Mirza Kuchek Khan. In the days that followed, the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic was established, and the Bolsheviks quickly began a project of political education, which included the printing of propaganda, organizing subbotniks (days of volunteer labor), spreading literacy, and performing didactic plays. In doing so, some members of the Persian Red Army relied on inventive ways to spread communist ideals among the population, such as adopting local dress, performing Persian and Gilaki music, and framing tales from the Shahnameh and cultural practices such as Nowruz within a socialist framework.
While previous scholarship on the rise and fall of Soviet Republic of Gilan have focused on the political environment and military engagements of the Jangalis and the Red Army, there has been little exploration of the cultural platform of the Bolsheviks during their occupation of northern Iran. This paper is a close examination of the Persian Red Army’s cultural and education programs during the short-lived Persian Socialist Soviet Republic (1920-21).
Using a variety of sources, such as issues of Russian-language newspaper Krasniy Iran (Red Iran), the writings of the well-known futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, as well as the memoirs of Aleksei Kosterin, I will demonstrate that the Red Army attempted to articulate “Persianness” in their cultural programs as a political strategy for gaining local support in Gilan.
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Mr. Samuel Hodgkin
While it is a commonplace that Central Eurasian ethnic identities were some of the Soviet Union’s most durable ideological creations, scholars have too often back-projected the self-serious primordialism of late Soviet nationalities studies onto the interwar period. As in many 20th-century nation-building projects, the commissars and artists who developed Soviet national repertories regarded the enterprise as high-stakes, but also as contingent, self-conscious, and even playful. Nancy Condee’s phrase “ethnic drag” captures the central role of costumed performativity in the cultural production of models for the Soviet ethnic citizen. Whether these models were “impostors” or “natives,” the gestures in the repertory of ethnic representation were always self-consciously affected and theatrical. That is, if among cultural elites (then and now), the “Eastern” arts are seen to be at the heart of Soviet kitsch, such campiness is not the preserve of condescending outsiders, but was interior to the performance itself from the beginning.
This paper examines one prop that played a foundational role in the making of Soviet “ethnic drag,” a prop that also reveals that repertory’s Persianate background: the quilted robe of honor (khil‘at). Robes have a long history as a symbolic gift in the patronage ceremonies of Persianate courts and Sufi orders. Soviet cultural historians and anthropologists have long discussed the political economy of Stalinism as a gift economy, and at the mid-1930s Kremlin ceremonies that established the “friendship of peoples,” in exchange for Stalin’s supposed generosity, the Eastern national representatives’ counter-gifts to the Central Committee were usually robes of this same type. Following the gift (often accompanied by poetic recitation), the robes were put on by national representatives and Central Committee members alike, in an atmosphere of ironic play captured by stenographic transcripts of the ceremonies. Thick description of these ceremonies, gesture by gesture and couplet by couplet, provides the basis for a preliminary reading of the cultural poetics of Soviet nationalities policy, while the khil‘at permits a case study in Soviet official culture’s continuities and discontinuities within the longue durée of Eurasian culture.
