Iran
The Rebirth of a Nation
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- $59.99
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- $59.99
Publisher Description
In this unprecedented book, Hamid Dabashi provides a provocative account of Iran in its current resurrection as a mighty regional power. Through a careful study of contemporary Iranian history in its political, literary, and artistic dimensions, Dabashi decouples the idea of Iran from its colonial linkage to the cliché notion of “the nation-state,” and then demonstrates how an “aesthetic intuition of transcendence” has enabled it to be re-conceived as a powerful nation. This rebirth has allowed for repressed political and cultural forces to surface, redefining the nation’s future beyond its fictive postcolonial borders and autonomous from the state apparatus that wishes but fails to rule it. Iran’s sovereignty, Dabashi argues, is inaugurated through an active and open-ended self-awareness of the nation’s history and recent political and aesthetic instantiations, as it has been sustained by successive waves of revolutionary prose, poetry, and visual and performing arts performed categorically against the censorial will of the state.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Declaring at the outset that he has an "ax to grind," Columbia University professor Dabashi focuses on the last 200 years of Iranian history, through the lens of a worldly cosmopolitan. He rejects the familiar dichotomy between the "traditional" and the "modern" in Iran, arguing that it's at best ill-conceived and at worst a tool of European/American colonialism. Instead, Dabashi suggests the notion of an "anticolonial modernity," predicated on Iranians' struggles "against the colonial robbery of the moral and material foundations of historical agency." While he raises many worthy questions, Dabashi's thesis is weakened by a lack of nuance. He also exhibits many of the flaws he decries, establishing, for instance, his own dichotomies ("for us the world was squarely divided into two opposing parts: those who ruled it and those who resisted this tyranny") and using a historical terminology to dismiss people, ideas or national projects with which he disagrees (e.g., equating Iran's Islamic Republic with America's "Christian empire"). Peppered alternately with delightful vignettes from his Iranian youth and dense academic-speak, the result is a book that may please those who agree with its author, but is unlikely to win over the uninitiated.
