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 clich? 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 nations future beyond its fictive postcolonial borders and autonomous from the state apparatus that wishes but fails to rule it. Irans sovereignty, Dabashi argues, is inaugurated through an active and open-ended self-awareness of the nations 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.
Introduction: The Rebirth of a Nation
Chapter 1Persian Empire?
Chapter 2A Civil Rights Movement
Chapter 3A Metamorphic Movement
Chapter 4An Aesthetic Reason
Chapter 5Shi-ism at Large
Chapter 6Invisible Signs
Chapter 7A Transnational Public Sphere
Chapter 8Cosmopolitan Worldliness
Chapter 9Fragmented Signs
Chapter 10The End of the West
Chapter 11Damnatio Memoriae
Chapter 12Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make Me a Myth
Conclusion: What Time Is It?
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia Univl3)
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