Iran: The Rebirth of a Nation: 2016

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. 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.-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: The Rebirth of a Nation....Pages 1-35 Chapter One: Persian Empire?....Pages 37-54 Chapter Two: A Civil Rights Movement....Pages 55-72 Chapter Three: A Metamorphic Movement....Pages 73-91 Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason....Pages 93-122 Chapter Five: Shi’ism at Large....Pages 123-145 Chapter Six: Invisible Signs....Pages 147-172 Chapter Seven: A Transnational Public Sphere....Pages 173-194 Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitan Worldliness....Pages 195-215 Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs....Pages 217-235 Chapter Ten: The End of the West....Pages 237-251 Chapter Eleven: Damnatio Memoriae....Pages 253-280 Chapter Twelve: Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make me a Myth....Pages 281-310 Conclusion: What Time Is It?....Pages 311-334 Back Matter....Pages 335-345 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 cliche 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.