Iran: The Rebirth of a Nation

ISBN-13: 9781349952304 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 345 str.

Hamid Dabashi

Spis treści

Introduction: The Rebirth of a Nation

Chapter 1 Persian Empire?

Chapter 2 A Civil Rights Movement

Chapter 3 A Metamorphic Movement

Chapter 4 An Aesthetic Reason

Chapter 5 Shi-ism at Large

Chapter 6 Invisible Signs

Chapter 7 A Transnational Public Sphere

Chapter 8 Cosmopolitan Worldliness

Chapter 9 Fragmented Signs

Chapter 10 The End of the West

Chapter 11 Damnatio Memoriae

Chapter 12 Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make Me a Myth

Conclusion: What Time Is It?

O autorze

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, USA. He received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is one of the most senior scholars of Iran in the world and author of hundreds of scholarly essays and dozens of books, including: Iran: A People Interrupted, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire, and Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror.

Blurb

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.