Author: Fereshteh Daftari Publisher: ISBN: 9781788316620 Category : Art, Iranian Languages : en Pages : 267
Book Description
The modern and contemporary art of Iran has often been understood, and positioned by commercial institutions, as decorative or ethnic--hence the focus on calligraphy and veiled women. While at a scholarly level it has been characterised as a comment on the socio-political context of the country: repressed inside Iran and, among artists in diaspora, as a focus for a complex identity discourse. Viewing Iranian art as neither a commodity, nor an illustration of theory, Fereshteh Daftari approaches the modern art of Iran as a democratic space where pluralism--a range of different styles and ideas--can thrive. This art historical exploration offers new insights into Iranian art, from the late 19th century Qajar period, via the Saqqakhaneh movement of the 1960s and into the contemporary world. In the process the author comments on the concept of modernism in a non-Western environment. She takes both a specific and a panoramic view of Iranian art to expose new themes like the subversive appropriation of traditional art, whilst also tackling more perennial issues like gender. With experience as an international curator, Daftari analyses the way Iranian artists have been represented outside the country and discusses the different routes by which modern Iranian art has been introduced to a Western audience, explaining the process by which Iranian art has developed and how it navigates between the individual and the political.
Author: Fereshteh Daftari Publisher: Asia Society Museum ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
'Iran Modern' offers a timely exploration of the cultural diversity and production of avant-garde art in Iran after World War II and up to the revolution, from 1950 through to 1979.
Author: Tom Holland Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0307386988 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
A "fresh...thrilling" (The Guardian) account of the Graeco-Persian Wars. In the fifth century B.C., a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took on the Great King of Persia, and thereby saved not only themselves but Western civilization as well, is as heart-stopping and fateful as any episode in history. Tom Holland’s brilliant study of these critical Persian Wars skillfully examines a conflict of critical importance to both ancient and modern history.
Author: Negar Mottahedeh Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804796734 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 149
Book Description
The protests following Iran's fraudulent 2009 Presidential election took the world by storm. As the Green Revolution gained protestors in the Iranian streets, #iranelection became the first long-trending international hashtag. Texts, images, videos, audio recordings, and links connected protestors on the ground and netizens online, all simultaneously transmitting and living a shared international experience. #iranelection follows the protest movement, on the ground and online, to investigate how emerging social media platforms developed international solidarity. The 2009 protests in Iran were the first revolts to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, just as the 1979 Iranian Revolution was agitated by cassette tapes. And as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms also adapted and developed to accommodate this global activism. Provocative and eye-opening, #iranelection reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, of the uses of hashtags and trending topics, selfies and avatar activism, and citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.
Author: Pamela Karimi Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503631818 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 431
Book Description
Alternative Iran offers a unique contribution to the field of contemporary art, investigating how Iranian artists engage with space and site amid the pressures of the art market and the state's regulatory regimes. Since the 1980s, political, economic, and intellectual forces have driven Iran's creative class toward increasingly original forms of artmaking not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in private homes with "trusted" audiences, derelict buildings, leftover urban zones, and remote natural sites. While many of these venues operate independently, others are fully sanctioned by the state. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater experts, musicians, and designers, Pamela Karimi throws into sharp relief the extraordinary art and performance activities that have received little attention outside Iran. Attending to nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, Karimi discloses the push-and-pull between the art community and the authorities, and discusses myriad instances of tentative coalition as opposed to outright partnership or uncompromising resistance. Illustrated with more than 120 full-color images, this book provides entry into unique artistic experiences without catering to voyeuristic curiosity around Iran's often-perceived "underground" culture.
Author: Mikiya Koyagi Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503627675 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility. Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.
Author: Narges Bajoghli Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503610306 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
A Middle East scholar shares an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran’s citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation―whether dissidents or fundamentalists―are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men―what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.
Author: Thomas Juneau Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804795088 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
The Islamic Republic of Iran faced a favorable strategic environment following the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Its leadership attempted to exploit this window of opportunity by assertively seeking to expand Iran's interests throughout the Middle East. It fell far short, however, of fulfilling its long-standing ambition of becoming the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and a leading regional power in the broader Middle East. In Squandered Opportunity, Thomas Juneau develops a variant of neoclassical realism, a theory of foreign policy mistakes, to explore the causes and consequences of Iran's sub-optimal performance. He argues that while rising power drove Iranian assertiveness—as most variants of realism would predict—the peculiar nature of Iran's power and the intervention of specific domestic factors caused Iran's foreign policy to deviate, sometimes significantly, from what would be considered the potential optimal outcomes. Juneau explains that this sub-optimal foreign policy led to important and negative consequences for the country. Despite some gains, Iran failed to maximize its power, its security and its influence in three crucial areas: the Arab-Israeli conflict; Iraq; and the nuclear program. Juneau also predicts that, as the window of opportunity steadily closes for Iran, its power, security, and influence will likely continue to decline in coming years.
Author: Roxanne Varzi Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804796890 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Leili could not have imagined that arriving late to Islamic morals class would change the course of her life. But her arrival catches the eye of a young man, and a chance meeting soon draws Leili into a new circle of friends and artists. Gathering in the cafes of Tehran, these young college students come together to create an underground play that will wake up their generation. They play with fire, literally and figuratively, igniting a drama both personal and political to perform their play—just once. From the wealthy suburbs and chic coffee shops of Tehran to subterranean spaces teeming with drugs and prostitution to spiritual lodges and saints' tombs in the mountains high above the city, Last Scene Underground presents an Iran rarely seen. Young Tehranis navigate their way through politics, art, and the meaning of home and in the process learn hard lessons about censorship, creativity, and love. Their dangerous discoveries ultimately lead to finding themselves. Written in the hopeful wake of Iran's Green Movement and against the long shadow of the Iran-Iraq war, this unique novel deepens our understanding of an elusive country that is full of misunderstood contradictions and wonder.
Author: Farzin Vejdani Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 080479281X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
Iranian history was long told through a variety of stories and legend, tribal lore and genealogies, and tales of the prophets. But in the late nineteenth century, new institutions emerged to produce and circulate a coherent history that fundamentally reshaped these fragmented narratives and dynastic storylines. Farzin Vejdani investigates this transformation to show how cultural institutions and a growing public-sphere affected history-writing, and how in turn this writing defined Iranian nationalism. Interactions between the state and a cross-section of Iranian society—scholars, schoolteachers, students, intellectuals, feminists, and poets—were crucial in shaping a new understanding of nation and history. This enlightening book draws on previously unexamined primary sources—including histories, school curricula, pedagogical materials, periodicals, and memoirs—to demonstrate how the social locations of historians writ broadly influenced their interpretations of the past. The relative autonomy of these historians had a direct bearing on whether history upheld the status quo or became an instrument for radical change, and the writing of history became central to debates on social and political reform, the role of women in society, and the criteria for citizenship and nationality. Ultimately, this book traces how contending visions of Iranian history were increasingly unified as a centralized Iranian state emerged in the early twentieth century.
Author: Fereshteh Daftari
Author: Fereshteh Daftari
Author: Tom Holland
Author: Negar Mottahedeh
Author: Pamela Karimi
Author: Mikiya Koyagi
Author: Narges Bajoghli
Author: Thomas Juneau
Author: Roxanne Varzi
Author: Farzin Vejdani