Babak Elahi

Babak Elahi shows how electronic literature in its public display, its interactivity, and its paradoxical combination of ephemerality and permanence brings us closer to the ancients than to the moderns - and closer still to the collective ritual experiences that Arabic and Muslim literature always valued over Western individualism. Further still, the emergence of Arabic e-lit does not just mean inclusions of still more cultural or ethnic identities. The politics of identity is yet another Western concern that an online Arabic poetics is happy to leave behind.

Ronald Reagan’s iconic, 1984 advertisement, “Morning in America,” has served as an ideological pole star for Republican identity for the past four decades. More recently, the political action committee, The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republicans, produced a number of ads highly critical of President Donald Trump’s administration. One specific ad, “Mourning in America,” uses the form of the original 1984 ad to communicate a set of radically different ideas from the original. This article fuses Black’s second persona and Wander’s third persona to Charland’s idea of constitutive rhetoric to explore how “Morning in America” constitutes a Republican identity via a matrimonial symbolism that connects candidate to a gauzy, constructed community and imagined culture. We argue that the Lincoln Project’s “Mourning in America” deconstitutes the very ideals promulgated in the original ad through a stark funereal symbolism. The implications of this symbolism on the Republican identity are di...

In Cultural Schizophrenia, an anti-colonial diagnosis of Islamic cultures, Darius Shāyegān argues that Michel Foucault’s concept of the episteme is monolithic, and, thus, inadequate in explaining the wounds of colonial modernity. Quoting from The Order of Things, where Foucault states that in “a given culture at a given moment, there is never more than one episteme defining the possible conditions for all knowledge,” Shāyegān argues that the “painful experience” of Islamic cultures shows that competing epistemes are not “monolithic, mutually exclusive blocs each of which monopolizes a given period.”1 On the contrary, competing epistemes “coexist, at the cost of reciprocal deformation.” Shāyegān concludes that it is

As public discourse, art reviews comprise a complex interplay between aesthetics and politics, particularly in societies that suppress open dissent. In the decade leading up to President Ahmadinejad's reelection in 2009, the art review became (not for the first time in Iran's history) an important form of public engagement. Combining art historical and sociological approaches, this article examines how art criticism became a form of aesthetic and political engagement in Iran in the 2000s. Relying on archived pages of the cultural website tehranavenue.com, this article argues that the art review comprises a key social discourse in Iran's public sphere. Introduction Iranian artists are often caught between the regulatory regimes of a state that reaches into everyday life and the markets and discourses of the global north that attempt to recruit them or their work into neoliberal geopolitics or neo-Oriental representation. Newsha Tavakolian is a recent case in point. Tavako...

Nazila Fathi’s The Lonely War joins a number of similar journalist memoirsby Iranian or Iranian émigrés, including Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds(Harper Collins: 2010), Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (Public Affairs: 2014), andMaziar Bahari’s Then They Came for Me (Random House: 2011), which wasrecently reissued as Rosewater and adapted into a film by The Daily Show’sJon Stewart. Fathi and Bahari mostly grew up in Iran, whereas Azadeh Moaveni and Roya Hakakian mostly grew up in the United States. Thus theyoffer a different sort of history, one that is less inclined toward nostalgia or narrativesof leaving and return.As a proverbial first draft of history, Fathi’s memoir appeals to a wide audienceinterested in current affairs, but also to policy wonks in both the mediaand politics. Fellow journalists seem captivated by such stories, particularlywhen they involve the author’s attempts to analyze civil society in the IslamicRepublic. Fathi’s work will also appeal to Iranians in the di...

Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema By Hamid Dabashi Mage, 2007 456 pp./$60.00 (hb) Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema By Negar Mottahedeh Duke University Press, 2008 216 pp./$22.00 (sb) Iranian Cinema: A Political History By Hamid Reza Sadr I.B. Tauris, 2006 392 pp./$33.00 (sb). It is a pivotal point in Iran's political and cultural history. As Hamid Dabashi puts it in a recent Al Ahram article, "What is happening in Iran is a 'revolution,' though not in a mundane politics of despair but in form, in language, in style, in decorum, in demeanour, in visual and performative sublimity. " (1) Judging from the show of green in support of the Iranian people at the Venice Film Festival--where Hana Makhmalbaf's Green Days, which documents the 2009 elections, was added to the program at the last minute Iranian filmmakers will play an important role in the future of cinema. Three recent books address questions of politics and film Iran, and each provides a useful angle of analysis, though Negar Mottahedeh's Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema puts forth a more careful deployment of film theory and more illuminating readings than the sweeping overviews in Hamid Reze Sadr's Iranian Cinema: A Political History and Hamid Dabashi's Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema Dabashi's Masters & Masterpieces seems to promise auteur criticism, but is more deeply guided by Dabashi's project of historicizing Iran's encounter with colonial European modernity. Like his previous work, Iran: A People Interrupted (200), Masters & Masterpieces provides a rich account of Iranian literary and intellectual history. Dabashi covers twelve directors, beginning with the poet Forough Farrokhzad and concluding with Jafar Panahi. Each of these chapters places a key film in its literary and political context, often pairing filmmakers with their literary collaborators--Dariush Mehrjui with psychiatrist and author Gholam Hosayn Sa'edi, Bahman Farmanara with surrealist writer Houshang Golshiri, and Ebrahim Golestan, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Bahram Beyza'i's film careers within their own literary work. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These chapters also form two complementary ares tracing formal change along the lines of realism, and marking shifts in political and aesthetic consciousness. The first formal are follows the development of "realism" that Dabashi characterizes as "poetic" in Farrokhzad's The House Is Black (1963), "affective" in Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror (1965), "psychedelic" in Mehrjui's The Cow (1969), "actual" in Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees (1994), and so on, down to the unself-conscious "parabolic" realism of Marziyeh Meshkini and the "visual" realism of Panahi. Imposing this formal framework seems forced at times, but it provides insights into a cinema that grew out of Farrokhzad's blending of poetics of sound and editing with a documentary vision. Directors who followed the lead of this metaphorical founding mother (or Eve to Golestan's Adam, as Dabashi puts it) continued to develop a realist visual mode as it took shape through the literary experimentations of the latter half of the twentieth century. "Realism," then, becomes complicated by these different literary aesthetics, until the full-fledged visual realism of Panahi. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This culmination of a formal are in Panahi's work coincides with the end of a are of political consciousness, and clears the way for liberatory unself-conscious style. Historically, Iranian filmmakers aimed consciously for "a creative constitution of subject with an active historical agency, in defiance of its moral and normative colonization at the hands European modernity" (31). But this self-conscious cinema of an earlier generation led to the un-self-conscious work of a director like Meshkini whose "aesthetics are . …

In her memoir To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America, Tara Bahrampour, an Iranian American journalist known for her writing in the popular press on Iran and Iranian Americans, describes what she calls "fake Farsi," an improvisational language game that she and her brother played as children. (1) To play the game, she pretends to "sound just like the Iranian TV broadcasters who string together unending chains of complicated words to announce the news." This game involves phonetic play within rules of grammar, a testing of possibilities within clearly understood boundaries. Bahrampour explains, "we make up Farsi-sounding sentences, keeping all the same pauses and inflections." She recalls reproducing "the formal pronunciation I've only heard from newscasters and from Iranians reciting poetry." She even offers a sample of fake Farsi in italics. After the real Persian phrase, "Salaam beenandegaan-e aziz [Hello, dear viewers]," and the date, Bahrampour launches into a long sentence of Persian-sounding gibberish: "Behdaayat-e mafianboolian, baad az forojamegaanha-ye khaghenaammat-e ..." and so on (57). The structure remains grammatically correct but the words make no sense. Young Tara strips the signifier from the signified, producing a language that is more somatic than semantic, more music than meaning. (2) However, this verbal game does have its ideological signification as a performative reworking of a formal, rule-bound apparatus and a ritualized yet flexible performance of national identity: the national television news broadcast and the recitation of classical poetry, respectively. By copying the styles of these two modes to produce a language without content, Bahrampour enacts a performative parody of national identity. (3) The discourse of television news, broadcast across national space at a specific time of day, produces national identity horizontally as an imagined community across geographical locations. The formal recitation of poetry, steeped as it is in the work of Iran's great national poets Hafez and Sa'di, produces national identity vertically as an imagined community in time. As Roya Hakakian recalls in her own memoir, Journey from the Land of No: "to engage in the national pastime, declaiming poetry, especially in the presence of an elder pro like Father, was foolish" (69). On her lather's mantelpiece "would be a volume of Hafez's collected poetry, just as certainly as there was a flag in every schoolyard, equal tokens of patriotism" (70). As a performance of identity through play with language, fake Farsi simultaneously destabilizes signification and yet signifies the very forms and formalities of Iranian national identity. In this sense, take Farsi is a kind of Persian blues. Like jam sessions derived from a fake book in which a musician deconstructs and reconstitutes an old standard, reworking the tonal meanings of popular songs, fake Farsi takes formal structures and reworks them into an improvisational reinvention of the original. This kind of rifting on language is an important part of literary constructions of ethnicity in the United States. (4) In Lost in Translation, for example, Eva Hoffman uses the term "riff" as a way of understanding the improvisation of a new self in a new language. Unlike the formal freedom associated with jazz, the blues rift is grounded in formulaic structures and stock phrases. (5) It is up to the blues player to rework and reinvent these standardized modes. Hoffman describes the "rift" as an "all-American form, the shape that language takes when it's not held down by codes of class, or rules of mannerliness, or a common repertory of inherited phrases" (218). In both American blues and Persian classical music, improvisation and composition are indistinguishable. Ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin has shown that "the creation of new phrases [in Iranian classical music performance] involves much more than the simple substitution of one formula for another, namely, the continuous negotiation of a network of choices in which the formulas themselves have a flexibility not usually associated with the term" (270). …

ABSTRACT The online city magazine TehranAvenue.com (TA) occupies the transnational crossroad of digital and urban space. It thus provides an important case study of how urban studies, postcolonial theory and critical cyber studies can be combined fruitfully to explain the potentialities and limits of digital and social networks in transnational Middle Eastern contexts. The article explores metaphors of the Internet as city, theories of transnational urban space and recent studies of the Internet and its politico-cultural uses in Iran to establish a theoretical method that can explain the simultaneity of local and transnational in digital and urban spaces. Qualitative data (email and telephone interviews with TA's founder, editor and contributors), combined with content analysis of the site, supports the claim that the city as metaphor and metonym can account for the intersection between contemporary North African and Middle Eastern digital spaces and national and diasporic urban spaces. The digital city – or blogabad – expands physical urban space into transnational networks. But there are important limits to the transnational reach of mediated social networking practices. In fact, the located identifications of web users are often much more important than the global reach of the technologies they use.

Smith and Nimmo assert that contemporary political conventions orchestrate an important legitimation ritual. Asignificant part of this ritual is composed of speechmaking. The 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions had a few notable speech moments. Specifically, the speeches by Illinois State Senator Barack Obama and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger garnered attention for both them and their party leaders. Along with the excitement these two speakers generated, they shared a common narrative thread in their two speeches. The difference between the speeches, the authors argue, lies in how the speakers enacted different elements of the moralistic and materialistic forms of the American dream. In accordance with Honig, the authors argue that Obama and Schwarzenegger functioned in this iconic way to reenchant, rescue, and reinvigorate each party's sense of purity, innocence, and goodness.

Kader Abdolah’s novel revolves around an exiled Iranian CODA (child of deaf adult) living in the Netherlands, and attempting to write a novel based on his father’s diary written in cuneiform script in a completely improvised language.  This linguistic puzzle—of an exiled CODA translating the indecipherable musings of his Deaf Iranian father into Dutch—presents some interesting problems and questions for understanding diasporic identity.  Using the terms oral self, literate self, and gestural self, this paper argues that the improvised sign language of gestures used by the Deaf father and the hearing narrator allows for an embodied self that challenges traditionally textualist conceptions of postcolonial power and diasporic resistance.  Bringing together the work of Deaf studies scholars with theories of diaspora and cognitive concepts of “bodily mimesis” the essay argues that the “Iranian self” of this novel is embodied in the gestural language of improvised sign.  Gestural language allows for a kind of linguistic embodiment unavailable either in the language of the home or the host culture, or in written or spoken language.  Most importantly, the bodily mimesis of improvised signs mitigates some of the pain, struggle, and loneliness traditionally associated with the diasporic condition as understood through writing or speech.

The online city magazine TehranAvenue.com (TA) occupies the transnational
crossroad of digital and urban space. It thus provides an important case study of how urban
studies, postcolonial theory, and critical cyber studies can be combined fruitfully to explain the
potentialities and limits of digital and social networks in transnational Middle Eastern contexts.
The paper explores metaphors of the Internet as city, theories of transnational urban space, and
recent studies of the Internet and its politico-cultural uses in Iran to establish a theoretical
framework. Qualitative data (e-mail and telephone interviews with TA’s founder, editor, and
contributors), combined with content analysis of the site, supports the claim that the city as
metaphor and metonym can account for the intersection between contemporary North African
and Middle Eastern digital spaces and national and diasporal urban spaces. The digital city—
or blogabad—expands physical urban space into transnational networks. But there are
important limits to this transnational reach, and the local implications are often much more
important.
Key Words: TehranAvenue.com, city, located, transnationalism, blogabad, Tehran