Iran Without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation
Categories: Books, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences

A history of the cosmopolitan forces that made contemporary Iran “No ruling regime,” writes Hamid Dabashi, “could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people.” For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in which the traditional ruling Islamist regime is counterposed to a modern population of educated, secular urbanites. However, Iran has for many centuries been a nation forged from a diverse mix of influences, most of them non-sectarian and cosmopolitan. In Iran Without Borders , the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homeland—either physically or emotionally—and imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious.


Sticky notes: On Kindle Scribe
Page Flip: Enabled
Language: English
File size: 1492 KB
Publisher: Verso
Print length: 256 pages
Publication date: August 9, 2016
Enhanced typesetting: Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
subtitle: Kindle Edition
author: Hamid Dabashi