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Iran after the Islamic Revolution & Politics of Diaspora Shirin Neshat
What does Arzoo Osanloo’s chapter help you understand about the history of “women’s rights talk”? What does she mean when she says that it is dialogical? What are the historical and political contingencies in Iran that have shaped women’s rights and their articulation by the women she writes about as an ethnographer? After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, how did the body of Iranian women come to represent the nation, under the Shah and under Khomeini? How is the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran a hybrid structure? How does it disrupt binaries of Western secular freedom vs. Muslim religious subjugation?
In Iftikhar Dadi’s article “Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Allegory” about her Women of Allah series, he writes, “The allegorical mode is profoundly ambivalent and complex, and it mediates meaning between realism and fiction in a manner analogous to the effect that the calligraphic screen in Neshat’s photographs creates between the work and the observer.” (128) What are the different kinds of images of veiled women that she alludes to, colonial or anti-colonial? How does she call into question or make more ambivalent and complex their signifying power? What does the calligraphic screen represent, especially for Western viewers who can’t read the script? What does Dadi mean by “postcolonial allegory”?
Why does Neshat set her feature film Women Without Men against the backdrop of the 1953 coup when British and American forces colluded to depose the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh? What do you think the four women in the film or the garden where they gather allegorize?
T 05.05
Arzoo Osanloo, The Politics of Women’s Rights in Iran, “A Genealogy of ‘Women’s Rights’ in Iran”
Iftikar Dadi, “Shirin Neshat’s Photographs as Postcolonial Allegory,” Signs
Th 05.07
Film Screening: Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men (This film is based on a novella with the same title by Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur.)
Excerpts from Q&A with Neshat as director:
The framing of the story is a fundamental even in Middle Eastern politics–the first and last democratic period in Iran–yet it’s almost unheard of today. Why is August 1953 so unknown outside the Middle East?
I’m not sure why, but I sense it’s only since Sept 11th that the American public has developed a genuine curiosity and interest in Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures and history. As far as I know, in the recent past, very few scholars or the media have pointed back to the Coup of 1953 organized by the CIA, which was directly responsible for the formation of the Islamic Revolution. I happen to believe revisiting history will prove to be helpful so we can put certain facts straight, to comprehend the foundation behind the conflict between the West and Muslims, and to offer new perspectives. For example, how Muslims indeed have been a subject of the criminal behavior of the great Western empires such as the United States and the British.
You’re obviously enchanted by the visual image of the chador. Is this fascination purely cinematic or is there something deeper?
My interest in the veil, or the chador, has both aesthetic and metaphoric reasoning. The veil has always been a complex subject; some consider it an “exotic” emblem, some find it a symbol of “repression,” while others find it a symbol of “liberation.” The veil seems to remain a Western controversy, while in fact the veil s what many Muslim wear in the public domain, so it does not always have to be so politically loaded. In Women Without Men, since it takes place in the 1950s, when the women actually had a “choice” regarding the veil, we have women like Munis and Faezeh, who are constantly veiled, then we have Fakhri who is Westernized and fashionable and not at all covered by it.
The garden figures prominently both in Persian culture and your upbringing. What, for you, is the ultimate significance of the garden, in your culture, your work and in this film?
The concept of a garden has been central to the mystical literature in Persian and Islamic traditions, such as in the classic poetry of Hafez, Khayyam and Rumi where the garden is referred to as the space for “spiritual transcendence.” In Iranian culture, the garden has also been regarded in political terms, suggesting ideas of “exile,” “independence,” and “freedom.” I have made several video-based works in which their concepts explore the symbolic value of the garden in the Islamic tradition. For example, in my brief video installation Tooba, the core of the film was the tree of Tooba, a mythological tree that is regarded as a “a sacred tree,” a “promised tree” in paradise. I created an imaginary garden where the tree of Tooba stood at its center, while a group of people ran toward it to take refuge. Both in Tooba and in Women Without Men the garden is treated as a space of both exile and refuge: an oasis where one can feel safe and secure.