Iran facing others
Subtitle: identity boundaries in a historical perspective
By: edited by Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780230102538
Subjects: Political culture; Iranian National characteristics; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Nationalism; POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory; Ethnic identity; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Civics & Citizenship; National characteristics, Iranian, in literature; Iranians; Foreign relations
Description: "This collection of essays is about Iranian identity in its various manifestations as it encountered the challenge of modernity. It problematizes the notion of an all-inclusive and universal "Iranian-ness" while considering the place of collective memory and sense of community. It consists of five parts organized along thematic lines. The first part, "The Legacy of Cultural Exclusion," deals with the medieval and early modern attempts to define notions of Iran and 'ajam and its supposed others--aniran, Turco-Mongols, and South Asians--through the Persian medieval epic, the Shahnamah, Persian literary histories and tazkirahs. The second part, "The Internal Frontiers," deals with the question of identity at the frontiers of Iran, including nineteenth century travel narratives in Khurasan, Azerbaijani regional re-readings of the significance of Babak Khorramdin, and Qashqa'i attitudes towards the "Iranian" state. The third part, "Empires and Encounters," examines the nature of Iranian interactions with Empires--Russian, British and Ottoman--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with an emphasis of political and cultural "othering". The fourth part, "Identity and Iranian Political Cultures," discusses the Iranian intellectual engagement with Orientalism and the shaping of Iranian understandings of self and other in the twentieth century. Part five, "Globalized anxieties," expands on the theme of Iranian cultural anxieties--both domestically and internationally--and how the modern Iranian state (including the Islamic Republic) copes with the challenges of globalization, the treatment of its own minorities, and imagined domestic enemies. Finally, it addresses how Iranian diaspora communities negotiate their identities abroad, particularly in the United States"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Part One: Legacy of Cultural Exclusion * Iran and Aniran: The Shaping of a Legend; title: Dick Davis * Redrawing the Boundaries of 'Ajam in Early Modern Persian Literary History; title: Sunil Sharma * Part Two: The Internal Frontiers * Iranian History in Transition: Recasting the Symbolic Identity of Babak Khorramdin; title: Touraj Atabaki * Across the Black Sands and the Red: Travel and the Frontiers of Nineteenth-Century Central Asia; title: Arash Khazeni * Part Three: Empires and Encounters * Facing a Rude and Barbarous Neighbor: Iranian Perceptions of Russia and the Russians from the Safavids to the Qajars; title: Rudi Matthee * British Imperialism, Regionalism, and Nationalism in Iran, 1889-1919; title: H. Lyman Stebbins * Shifting Loyalties in Imperial Borderlands: Safavid Renegades and Ottoman Rebels; title: Fariba Zarinebaf * Part Four: Self-Fashioning and Othering * The Academic Debate on Iran and Iranian Identity: Challenging Nationalist and Orientalist Narratives; title: Afshin Matin-Asgari * Some Thoughts on Inter-Societal Linkages between Iran and Iraq; title: Houchang Chehabi * Part Five: Domestic and Globalized Anxieties * Dolgoruki's 'Memoirs': From Fiction to Master Narrative; title: Mina Yazdani * Zoroastrians of Iran and Parsis of India: A Dilemma of Identity; title: Monica Ringer.