Hamid Dabashi

The Rebirth of a Nation

Hamid Dabashi Iran

The Rebirth of a Nation Hamid Dabashi Department of , South Asian, and African Studies, Institute for and Society New York, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-59240-8 ISBN 978-1-137-58775-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58775-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950873

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005, acrylic on straw-and-mud, 100x70cm

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York In Memory of Martyr Ahmad Ali Vahabzadeh (1965–1988) and for his mourning brother Peyman Vahabzadeh and for the mother of them all, my sister Mahfarid Mansourian who carries all their memories with grace

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I proposed the idea of this book to my good friend and Palgrave publisher Farideh Koohi-Kamali over a delightful lunch in New York early in the Spring 2016. I am grateful for her enduring friendship and visionary leadership of a major publishing adventure with far-reaching consequences for state-of-the-art scholarship. I began writing this book in my home in New York, then during my multiple trips to Europe and then fi nally fi nished it while tucked away during a sabbatical leave from Columbia in an apartment overlooking the Persian Gulf from its southern shores in Doha, Qatar. I would look at the GPS on my iPhone and zoom out from my current location to see my hometown , and then Shiraz, Isfahan, Tehran, and Tabriz popping up. It was and it remains an uncanny feeling. I was there and not there. I am neither in exile nor in diaspora, concepts for which I have no use. I live wherever I am and I write about things I love and deeply care. Like everything else I have written, this is the product of a peripa- tetic thinker, a stateless person completely and confi dently at home in the world. From Mexico to Argentina, then up North toward Canada, East toward Europe and then the Arab world, into India, Japan, and South Korea: These are the places I have felt most at home. Everywhere I go Iran goes with me. “Do you ever go back to Iran?” someone recently asked me on my Facebook. “No,” I responded, “Iran always comes back to me.” From this vantage point I have neither a privileged nor a disadvantaged position: Just one position and point of view, replete with its blindness and insights, precisely like any other book if written from my hometown Ahvaz or from Shiraz, Isfahan, Tehran, Tabriz, or Mashhad. A primary

vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS function of this fact has been an attempt to stop fetishizing the location of the of writing, and recognize that you can write worldly books never leaving Ahvaz or write punishingly nativist books from New York and Paris. I am grateful to all my friends, colleagues, comrades in four corners of the world who have enabled me to write this way, beginning with my colleagues at my home at Columbia University to any other institution of higher learning in Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia, or the Arab world that have over these years hosted me so kindly and generously. I wish to single out Timothy Mitchell and Sheldon Pollock, successive chairs of my department at Columbia, for facilitating my leave of absence to fi nish this book. I wish to thank Azmi Bishara, Yasir Suleiman, Rashid El Enany, Abderrahim Benhadda, and Elia Zureik for their kind and gracious hospitality while I was visiting the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies during my sabbatical leave from Columbia. While at Doha Institute I had the rare privilege of meeting and getting to know many brilliant Arab scholars and academics that warmly embraced me in the heart of their hospitality. I wish to mention in particular my dear- est friends and colleagues in the Comparative Literature program: Ayman El Desouky, Eid Mohamed, Atef Botros, and Nijmah Hajjar—for the sheer plea- sure of their magnifi cent company while I was in Doha. I also wish to mention my other dear friends and colleagues at the Institute: Dana Olwan, Imed Ben Labidi, Ismail Nashaf, Suhad Nashaf, Mohamed Mesbahi, and Raja Bahlul for their gracious company. I wish to thank the staff of the Doha Institute for their hospitality: Nadine Ataya, Youssef Ghadban, Mohammad Almasri, Jad Kawtharani, Malik Habayeb, Inaam Charaf, Tania Hashem, and Dena Qaddumi. They all came together to make me feel at home not just in Doha but by virtue of their own national origin in fact at home from one end of the Arab world to another. I wish to thank my Aljazeera friends and editors Tanya Goudsouzian, Cagri Ozdemir, Azadeh Najafi , and their beautiful families for their con- tinued friendship. Both Tanya and Azadeh were exceptionally kind and generous in their hospitalities, offering me an Armenian and Iranian home, respectively. I wish to thank Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu-Assad, dearest friends and towering Palestinian fi lmmakers, who took me to the heart of the Doha Film Institute while in Doha to meet the exceptionally gifted critical thinkers and artistic directors who are running that fi ne institution. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

It is my equal pleasure to acknowledge and thank the distinguished artists whose work grace this book and who have kindly and generously allowed me to use their work as illustrations of the points I have been trying to make. My dear friend and distinguished colleague, Hamid Keshmirshekan, the eminent historian of contemporary and modern art in Iran, has been instrumental in procuring high-resolution copies and permissions for me to be able to feature these illustrations in my book. The artists who are my personal friends have also been kind, generous, and gracious for allowing me to reproduce their artwork in this book. I wish to thank Parviz Kalantari, Mana Neyestani, Golrokh Nafi si, Koorosh Shishehgaran, Esrafi l Shirchi, Amir Naderi, Abbas Kiarostami, Nicky Nodjoumi, Sara Dolatabadi, the late Ardeshir Mohassess, Azadeh Akhlaghi, Bahram Beizai, Golnaz Fathi and their respective galleries for their very kind help in procuring these pictures. My exceptionally competent research assistant Hawa Ansary is a blessing to have had by my side over the last few years, to whom I remain always grateful. Thank you, friends: You are all the cause and condition of the rebirth of any half-decent idea I may have offered in this book.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Rebirth of a Nation 1

Chapter One: Persian ? 37

Chapter Two: A Civil Rights Movement 55

Chapter Three: A Metamorphic Movement 73

Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason 93

Chapter Five: Shi’ism at Large 123

Chapter Six: Invisible Signs 147

Chapter Seven: A Transnational Public Sphere 173

Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitan Worldliness 195

Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs 217

Chapter Ten: The End of the West 237

Chapter Eleven: Damnatio Memoriae 253

xi xii CONTENTS

Chapter Twelve: Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make me a Myth 281

Conclusion: What Time Is It? 311

Index 335 LIST OF FIGURES

Image 1 Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005 17 Image 1 Mana Neyestani, Untitled, 2009 45 Image 1 Golrokh Nafi si, The Sky is ours, 2010 63 Image 1 Koorosh Shishehgaran, Untitled, from the War series, circa 1984 81 Image 1 Esrafi l Shirchi, If you came to visit me, unknown date 107 Image 1 Hasan Ismailzadeh, The Campaign of Rustam and Ashkbous, no date, circa mid-twentieth century 133 Image 1 Amir Naderi, The Runner, 1985 159 Image 1 Abbas Kiarostami, Untitled, from the Roads series, 1989 183 Image 1 Nicky Nodjoumi, The Accident, 2013 204 Image 1 Sara Dolatabadi, untitled, 2012 225 Image 1 Ardeshir Mohassess, Untitled (aka “Man with Tongue,” or “Celebrating Teacher’s Day”), 1995 243 Image 1 Azadeh Akhlaghi, Assassination of Mirzadeh Eshghi, 2012 267 Image 1 Bahram Beizai, Bashu: The Little Stranger (1989) 295 Image 1 Golnaz Fathi, 120 x 120cm—acrylic on canvas—2004—untitled 321

xiii Introduction: The Rebirth of a Nation

The idea of this book dawned on me by a photograph. It was early in the evening of 1 May 2012, and Mahmoud Dolatabadi, the preeminent Iranian novelist, was visiting New York. He and I had just come out of a reading of his most recent novel, The Colonel , from the City University of New York (CUNY) and were sitting at a nearby café and having tea— with his daughter Sara. Soon we called Amir Naderi, one of the most widely celebrated Iranian fi lmmakers who had left Iran years ago and lives in New York; though he was fl ying to Japan the following day, within minutes after he realized that Dolatabadi was in New York, he rushed to this café to join us. We sat there, Mahmoud Dolatabadi, Amir Naderi, Sara Dolatabadi, and me. Here were two seminal fi gures in the history of Iranian fi lm and fi ction, connected together in a moment of history. They had met before in Iran when Naderi was working on one of his masterpieces, “Tangsir” (1974), and had solicited Dolatabadi’s help on his script. But the fate had separated them—with Dolatabadi working and living mostly in Iran, and Naderi doing so mostly in New York. As Naderi, Dolatabadi, and I were chatting, Sara Dolatabadi took my iPad and took a few snapshots of us. Captured in those snapshots was a moment when the fi ctive frontiers of Iran meant nothing, exposed their forced politi- cal power, and revealed their porous disposition in understanding Iranian cultural history. The timing of that photograph marked the untiming of a history that had long since run along ahead of itself. The untiming of that photograph marks the moment when I began asking myself, what time is it? Where in the world are we? Upon what

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1 H. Dabashi, Iran, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58775-6_1 2 H. DABASHI phase in the history of nations, peoples, regions, , and the fragile earth do we dwell? Are we all on a Christian calendar, a Muslim, a Jewish, Hindu, agnostic, atheist—how do we count our days? On a global scale, where would we locate ourselves, morally, temporally, spatially? The thing Europeans call “modernity” has failed, even and through its postmodern renditions. For the rest of the world, colonial modernity brought nothing spectacular either. Enlightenment ended up in Auschwitz and sent leading German Jewish philosophers (Adorno and Horkheimer) to California to ponder the plight of our humanity, if they were not more determined in their terrifi ed recognitions and committed suicide (Walter Benjamin) before they crossed one European border to another. Not just European modernity and Enlightenment but fake traditions that fanatical (Muslim or Hindu, etc.) metaphysicians had fabricated exposed themselves for being the banality that they were. So no tradition, no modernity, no Enlightenment—with any enduring legacy to protect and safeguard the most basic tenets of our humanity. Now what? Not just socialist promises of paradise, but the capitalist hell, and the Islamist lunacy it has engendered is now murdering and causing mayhem in the heart of Muslim lands. Now what? Where in the world are we, and what time of our history is it exactly? Europeans have asked these sorts of questions after many critical points in their history, after their fi n de siècle, between what they call their two “World Wars,” after the Jewish Holocaust, and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 1 But what about the world at large—do we too think and refl ect upon the eras and epochs that we have lived through? Take the occasions of Arab revolutions of 2011, or before it the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, or after it the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the USA, concomitant with the Gezi Park uprising of 2013, the Indignado revolt, the student uprising in Quebec, and the labor unrest from Greece to Spain that resulted in major uprisings against the austerity measures imposed by the European Union (EU). No part of the world is exempt from such indignant uprisings. Just before the World Cup 2014 in Brazil, there were massive revolts in reaction to it. When the Israelis invaded and destroyed Gaza there was global uproar against Zionist warmongering resulting in a major turn to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. The world at large is also poised to ask the question: where in the world are we, what time of history is it—have we not run out of “posts” to mark our predicament: postmodern, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and so on. We are not too late, or too early, to ask these seminal questions. Iranians were asking, “Where is my Vote?” just a few years ago. Arabs were demanding INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 3 the “Overthrow of the Regime.” Turks were declaring: “Government must resign!” Americans were ready to tear their fi nancial system to pieces. Europeans were revolting against the tyranny of European banks. Under similar, if not identical, circumstances, Europeans of a couple of generations earlier were marking “the Collapse of German Idealism,” “the Decline of the West,” as Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is Dead” echoed from one end of Europe to another, and Kierkegaard was busy with his critique of Hegel and speculative idealism. It is also at this time, as Gadamer recollects, “among the forces that gave philosophical expres- sion to the general critique of liberal culture-piety and the prevailing aca- demic philosophy was the revolutionary genius of the young Heidegger.” 2 Gadamer further reports: “The common theme that captured the imagi- nation of the time was called existential philosophy.” 3 The only difference between the time Gadamer reports and ours is that we can no longer localize our questions to Europe or non-Europe as provincial questions and think them universal. The crisis is, as it has always been, global and planetary, and at this point in history, we ought to be cured of European or non-European provincialism of one sort or another. Any question we ask about any particular point on the globe must resonate with the rest of the fragile planet we share. What would that mean today, and how would we rephrase Gadamer’s question beyond any particular European domesticity? What sorts of (existential) questions do we need to raise today to meet the challenges of our own time? “What is being?” This is how radically European philosophers of this period took their epochal task seriously. “In order to learn how to ask this question,” Gadamer reports, “Heidegger proceeded to defi ne the Being of human Dasein in an ontologically positive way, instead of understanding it as ‘merely fi nite’,” that is, in terms of an infi nite and always existing Being, as previous metaphysicians had done. The ontological priority that the Being of human Dasein acquired for Heidegger defi nes his philosophy as “fundamental ontology.” Can we ask similar, if not identical, questions from our varied locations around the world now: philosophers and thinkers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as those from contemporary Europe, from Greece to Spain, no longer thinking themselves outside the fold of our humanity? If so, what sort of questions would those be? For Europeans who thought themselves the center of the universe, these were questions of a particular sort. Gadamer clarifi es what they were: “When Heidegger raised once again the ancient question of the meaning of Being, he did not want to 4 H. DABASHI lose sight of the fact that, human Dasein does not have its real Being in determinable presence-at-hand, but rather in the motility of the care with which it is concerned about its own future and its own Being.” 4 If we were now to look at such questions with the curious eyes of anthropologists and wonder: What sort of “ancient questions” can we now ask anew? Do we humans around the world need to be concerned with and wonder about our “motility of the care” too? Does our future require any such, perhaps equally fundamental questions? What is most striking in Gadamer’s recollections is this: “It is fi nite, historical Dasein that ‘is’ in the real sense. Then the ready-to-hand has its place within Dasein’s projection of a world, and only subsequently does the merely present-at-hand receives its place.” 5 Does the Dasein of the world at large too require a projection of its own worldliness, worldliness beyond its provincial Heideggarian articulation, perhaps yes, no, maybe—but precisely in what terms?

THEORIZING THE HISTORICAL In this book, I wish to propose that what countries like Iran need is consis- tent theorization into the wider and deeper regional and historical param- eters of their origin and destination, far beyond their persistent nativist nationalism that from the early nineteenth century forward—through two monarchies and now an Islamic Republic—has laid fast rhetorical hold over the self-consciousness of the nation. That consciousness is false, to put it bluntly, a product of dominant hegemonies of power and — once monarchic not mullarchic. Academic scholars and public alike, old-fashioned Orientalists, area studies experts, think tank employ- ees, and vast encyclopedic projects dedicated in Persian and English to a grand of “Persia,” have all come together fashioning a jaundiced, rather banal, reading of the nation oscillating bewilderedly between its imperial past and its postcolonial possibilities, categorically cut off from its living organism as a nation, long before it was a state. Much to the chagrin of nativist Iranian jingoists, who swing between a pathological iso- lationism and a phony pride in a fi ctive past, the frontier fi ction of “Iran” must be positively disenchanted, its postcolonial borders fl ung open for a much richer, much more enabling, reading of the nation for it to reveal and expose its regional and global (and thereupon national) signifi cance. The theoretical poverty affl icting both the nativist reading of the nation and, even worse, its area specialists have come together to pile up tomes upon tomes of detailed historiography, or else strategic philandering to the benefi t of the think tank sponsors, having left the nation bereft of INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 5 any meaningful and enabling reading. The road ahead is both wide open and yet invisible from these blinded alleys. This book, and the body of scholarship I have produced before to prepare for it, points beyond such dead ends and toward those open highways. Let us assume, can we, that our poets are like their philosophers. Let us ask our poets what the world at large has been forced to learn from European philosophers—for better or worse. Let us approximate their philosophers and our poets. It would be a happy marriage. One such poet, Forough Farrokhzad, has a poem, now legendary in its signifi cance: It is called “Tavallodi Digar/Another Birth,” somewhere in which she says:

Safar-e hajmi dar khat-e zaman … The journey Of a volume upon the line of time— And with a volume Thus to impregnate The dry line of time: A volume Made of a conscious image Returning from a feast in a mirror . 6

Imagine the narrated that dry line of time, and the implosion of poets like Farrokhzad and their poetry that impregnating volume, enabling that line to mean more than it looks, signify beyond its dried borderlines. Now what exactly is the nature of that volume that this poetic implosion has enabled? It is made of a self-conscious image (tasviri agah ), returning from a feast in a mirror. Without this image and the imaginal feast from which it has just returned, the straight line of positivist historiography means very little more than it does to the employees of a warmongering think tank in Washington DC, or London or Paris. Theorizing Iranian history means to be conscious of such poetic implosions, aware of the manner in which it informs, enables, and enriches the line of history people ordinarily read and habitually nod their head after reading. We have had a false bifurcation between a “Literary History of Persia,” as say E.G. Browne would say, and a political history of Iran as much of the postcolonial historiography has rendered it. The task at hand is to fuse these two histories, go upstream from their forced bifurcation, and imagine the moment when the two were not separated artifi cially, violently, and forcefully, by the force of one disciplinary formation of colonial modernity or another. 6 H. DABASHI

“THE BIRTH OF A NATION” Cinematically precocious and groundbreaking and yet paradoxically considered as a hallmark of post-Civil War racism in American culture, D.W. Griffi th’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) occupies a strangely uncanny place in world cinema. 7 One is both drawn to and yet instantly repelled by it. A historic document of the Civil War in the USA and then Reconstruction in the South, this seminal event in world cinema is nar- ratively predicated on the assumption that “the bringing of the African to America planted the fi rst seed of disunion.” Is this a confession of the orig- inal sin, or is it the camoufl aging of a foundational myth? Be that as it may, that “seed of disunion” was coterminous with the very foundation of the USA as a normatively racist and constitutionally white supremacist nation- state to which a sustained history of African slavery, as well as the geno- cidal destruction of native Americans, was and has ever since remained defi nitive. It is in the explosion of the Civil War as the logical conclusion of that defi ning moment, when the logic of capitalism was breaking the Southern shackles of its own superseding reasons in the North, that the confessional drama of “The Birth of a Nation” ought to be understood. The fi lm was widely banned in many parts of the USA, while vastly cel- ebrated by others, especially by the members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) who saw it as an affi rmation of their racist cause. Exemplifi ed and nar- rated around the two families of the Stonemans in the North and the Camerons in the South, living on the two physical and symbolic sides of Mason-Dixon line, “The Birth of a Nation” narrows in on Carpetbaggers descending upon the South as the principle culprit of the post-Civil War trauma. In Griffi th’s version of this formative period in the US history, the South appears as the beacon of aristocratic morality, while the North, as best represented by his representation of the Carpetbaggers, as uncouth, fanatical, rude, opportunist, and vulgar. It is in that sharply emotive context that Griffi th’s portrayal of the KKK as the normative measure of Southern righteousness will have to be assayed, for as he understands it, the KKK is reacting to the heavy-handed treatment of the South by the North and the collapse of a universal code of moral authority. What Griffi th’s title, “Birth of a Nation,” suggests is the delivery of the USA as a nation predicated on the trauma of com- ing to terms with its racist foundation. The USA is thus born, as Griffi th suggests, not in the inaugural moment of 4 July 1776 when its initial 13 colonies declared independence from Great Britain, nor on the fact of the INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 7 pre-Civil War racial segregation, nor indeed in the post-Civil War attempt at overcoming of that racist heritage, but in fact in the enduring trauma of coming to terms with that racism and its bloody consequences. The USA was born on the enduring fact of subjugation, slavery, and the racialized codifi cation of power that has ever since sustained its ethos of conquest. Griffi th’s “The Birth of a Nation” summons the making of a national trauma—the trauma of racism and racial segregation at the heart of the US historical experience. For Griffi th, the trauma of racism and racial segregation coming to a bloody end is one particular way of coming to terms with a colonial experience, whereby African slavery was defi nitive to a national history and the bloody overcoming of it becomes the bloody birth of a nation. In that paradoxical sense, “The Birth of a Nation” is a “postcolonial” narrative of a fragmented society emerging from its own colonial and colonizing past, as it becomes an empire.

THE BIRTH OF POSTCOLONIAL NATIONS The post-Civil War era was the traumatic birth pangs of the USA when an entire history of slavery came to a crescendo to create the most enduring experience of a modern nation-state. The conquest of the New World, the shedding of the shackles of old British colonialism, the destruction of the native American culture, and the sustained slave trade were the successive stages that ultimately came to a crescendo in the course of the Civil Wars when the logic of capitalism necessitated a historic battle between the industrial North and the feudal South. The South lost and the North transformed the emerging nation-state into a bastion of capitalist conquest. In that sense, Griffi th’s “Birth of the Nation” is in fact emblematic of all postcolonial nation-states and their traumatic birth onto the scene of a globalized circulation of labor and capital. The American Civil War between the industrialized North and the feudal South was illustrative of a more global triumph of industrialized capitalism and its need for cheap labor and even cheaper raw material around the globe. On that global scale, equally traumatic moments have defi ned the postcolonial character of other nations and nationalisms—nations born out of specifi c traumas caused by the systematizing force of capital in need of regulated labor and expanded market. While in the USA, colonialism was internal and predicated on a long and nasty history of slavery, around the world, it was via an encounter with the globalized European colonialism. Nations 8 H. DABASHI were thus born out of national traumas, and people made into a nation by virtue of their colonial encounters and postcolonial struggles. Anticolonial nationalism is the birth channel of nations and nation-states. In Iran, like much of the rest of the colonial world, a succession of colonial encounters has been its birth certifi cate as a nation-state. Formation of the nation is the fateful encounter between the active memories of an imperial past and the unfolding drama of a postcolonial future. From the Russian impe- rial conquest of northern Qajar territories early in the nineteenth cen- tury, to the simultaneous French and British colonial interests in Iran, which continued apace into the preparatory stages of the Tobacco Revolt and Constitutional revolution (1906–1911), well into the British insti- gated coup d’état of Reza Shah (1926) and fi nally the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coup of 1953, are the hallmarks of this passage of the nation into traumatic self-consciousness. It is in the aftermath of the 1953 coup that its trauma is retroactively cast backward to defi ne and characterize the history of Iranian encounter with colonial modernity. What led to the coup of 1953 was the nationalization of Iranian oil industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height of the “Cold War,” The military coup of Reza Shah in the late 1920s and his dictatorial modernization in the 1930s. The Constitutional revolution of 1906–1911, the court-based modernization of the late 1900, the Babi Movement of the mid-nineteenth century and the Perso-Russian wars of the early nineteenth century were now all strung together into a chronicle of colonial encounters. From this side after the coup of 1953, the June 1963 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Siahkal uprising of 1970, and the rev- olutionary mobilization of 1977–1979, all unfolded toward a liberatory nar- rative. From the success of the violently Islamized revolution of 1979 to the June 2009 presidential election, the three decades of crisis management by the Islamic Republic, until its implosion, brought this drama to a crescendo. The accelerated implosion of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of the contested June 2009 presidential election soon assumed the iconic epithet of “the Green Movement”—a massive social uprising that had no name, only a color, a random color, where even its leading advocates doubted that it actually exists, compared with the leading ideologues of the Islamic revolution who were dead sure about everything. But the Green Movement had declared itself, however dialectically, amorphously, by its being denied, by being called a Fetneh/Sedition by its state-sponsor detractors, and through its works of art, that had remained decidedly open-ended and inconclusive. INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 9

The Islamic Republic was now imploding, as its ideological foreground- ing had gone completely off kilter. The implosion of the state apparatus and the corresponding explosion of its ideological foregrounding had loudly announced the end of as a potent political force. The state was imploding and thus marking the fi nal transition of the nation- state into a parting phase. Iran as a nation, a people, a public sphere, and a destiny was now parting ways with the Islamic as the modus operandi of a state that had rendered itself obsolete. The split came to a crescendo and then a crashing conclusion. We were now witness to the rebirth of the nation beyond its entanglement with any state, in the sense that the Islamic Republic was the aftertaste of prolonged colonial and postcolonial periods in Iran that began early in the nineteenth century and ended early in the twenty-fi rst century. What we were witnessing was the active transmutation of the Islamic Republic into a garrison state seeking (unsuccessfully) to strip its citizens of their social life, or spoon-feeding it if it could manage, meaning the colonial production of convincing and mobilizing (Islamism or otherwise) had come to a crashing political end, so that in that state of postcoloniality, Iran was exposed to the global condition of capital, directly, nakedly, stripped of all fabricated nativism. At this point, the state was functioning like a besieged garrison against the nation, while seek- ing to strip the citizens naked of their rights, while the system was being actively incorporated into a visual regime of globality (the public death of Neda Agha Soltan was the prime example), where the place of phantasm, paranoia, apocalypse, public frenzy, and manufactured mysticism had all come together in the fi nal upholding of this or any other Islamic Republic. The state was calling itself “Islamic Republic,” but there had remained no “republic” under its feet over which to be Islamic or anything else. The state had ideologically, structurally, and organically collapsed. It had pulled the republic from under its own feet. Islamic revolution was the fi nal call and cry and then the death of the colonial reasoning of revolt to end tyranny by another tyranny. The Islamic Republic is the last tyranny that could fool the nation into believing it to be a moment of liberation it could never be. The Green Movement was the announcement of the moment when the postcolonial reason can no longer deliver the emancipation of the postcolonial nation. For world at large, “postcolonial” means “postcolonial reason” beyond the reach of any “native informant” replacing the mark of Man. Postcolonial reason means postcolonial nation in the retrieved cosmopolitan disposition of its 10 H. DABASHI character and thus postcoloniality is the condition of an Enlightenment to which the emancipated postcolonial can lay a legitimate claim. The dissolution of the Islamic Republic means the fragmentation of the Islamic ideology, and the dissolution of Islamic ideology is the sign of the fi nal collapse of the postcolonial reason. The nation had now fi nally declared itself, as it had always been—an entirely different reality than all the ruling states that had laid false and falsifying claims on it. The postcolonial nation was no suzerainty of the postcolonial state.

ART AS OPERA APERTA If indeed postcolonial reason is no longer reasonable, and the state appara- tus has collapsed upon its own claim to legitimacy, what then? What time of the history is it now—when nations and states might have exhausted their short-lived marriage? The birth of the nation and the birth of the state have not been coterminous, I contend. Upon the shores of its colo- nial continents, the nation was born poetically, the state violently. If the state was now morally, structurally, and politically reduced to pure vio- lence, how was the nation faring: Did it have any reason to remain married to the state? I have already argued in my previous work that the idea of vatan/homeland stood for the public space into which the Persian poet moved once the royal court was no longer hospitable to him. This is in the course of the Constitutional revolution (1906–1911) when the Qajar dynasty was collapsing and the was nowhere in sight. Let us consider, fi guratively at least, the time span between 1906 when the Constitutional revolution began and 1926 when Reza Shah dismantled the Qajar dynasty and declared himself a king and formed what would soon become his own dynasty, the period when Persian poets (poets who composed poetry in Persian) invented the idea of vatan/homeland poeti- cally. During a hiatus between the demise of one dynastic state and the rise of the next, the idea of the nation/vatan was born from the poetic dispen- sation of creative minds released from one dynastic court never to return to any other. The idea of vatan/homeland was born poetically, by poets like Aref Qazvini and many others, while the subsequent substitution of the Pahlavi dynasty for the Qajar was by a military coup. With the same token, the expansion of the layered societal frontiers of the nation in the course of successive events from the nationalization of Iranian oil in the 1950s to the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in the late 1970s was marked entirely by rich and diversifi ed poetic turns in the course of Nimaic revolution, while the INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 11 fi rst Pahlavi abdicated after the allied occupation of Iran during World War II (1939–1944), the second returned after a CIA-sponsored coup (1953), and the Islamic Republic took over the Pahlavi and declared itself by the summary execution of the Pahlavi offi cials (1979), the militant takeover of the US embassy (1979–1981), and the bloody eight-year war it sustained with Iraq (1980–1988). If that were the case, then what does “freedom”—political or other- wise—mean on a national domain? Is freedom really defi ned and delimited by political oppression? When political oppression is lifted (suppose it was) are we not back to square one, without having cultivated any democratic intuition that defi nes, sustains, and nourishes freedom? What happens when habits of democratic intuition are not formed at such a potent politi- cal level that the ruling state acknowledges it, or what do we do the day after our political emancipation is granted or denied by the ruling state? If indeed on the remnant domains of former like the Mughals, the Safavids/the Qajars, or the Ottomans, postcolonial nations are born poetically (narratively, aesthetically, literary) before any state apparatus lays any claim on them, then we might consider art in general the site where the unimagined is imagined and the unthought is intuited. Here is the conceptual core of how I develop the notion of the aesthetic intuition of transcendence as the poetic manner through which we overcome (have overcome) the postcolonial reason. The “open-ended” of the work of art is where our intuition of transcendence discovers, declares, and announces itself. “Open-ended” (aperta) is Umberto Eco’s hermeneutic twist on a text, as an opera aperta , which he then seeks to control via his triangulated conception of intentions (of the author, the reader, and the text). I combine Eco’s hermeneutics with Gianni Vattimo’s notion of il pensiero debole/weak thought as the modus operandi of the work of art. From here, I propose aesthetic in the domain of its sovereignty, and not merely autonomy, to shift the operation of the political into an underlying poetic of resistance and fi nal triumph. 8 The work of art, not just in the sense of its mechanical reproduction (that Walter Benjamin anticipated) or electronic metastasis (which he could not), leaves a residue, some debris, a trace, which I wish to propose as the site of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence where the logic of the postcolonial reason fi nally exposes its vacuity and self-implodes. Benjamin did anticipate this overcoming of the postcolonial reason, though as a prototypically European thinker (even as a Marxist), he never went anywhere near the condition of coloniality. He did so inadvertently 12 H. DABASHI when toward the end of his short and tragic life, he turned to the active theorization of fragments and debris as the allegorical site of messianic salvation. But I reach that site slightly differently. Let us trace the body libido (as I did in my Corpus Anarchicum ) as it transforms into body social, and the social into the mythic, reaching for a shamanic moment when the mythic subconscious of the decay announces itself, taking the mass grave of the Khavaran cemetery, where the bodies of successive mass execution of political prisoners in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic are buried, as an event that does not allow for the evident decay to perish into oblivion. Khavaran becomes the site of an anamnesis, remembering the forcefully forgotten by looking at the debris, the trace, the fragmented and disallowed memories, and therefore the dust. There is a trace of signifi cant relic from the dust around Khavaran and the staging of art as public ritual, such as most pronouncedly in ’s oeuvre as a mobile mausoleum, as a shrine, a haram/sanctuary , full of iconic images: a new, and a renewed iconography staged to be sold. We must go to Shirin Neshat precisely because the global visual regime has successfully appropriated her art, through her clever gallery salesmanship, selling it for the visual debris of forgotten facts, for we must enter the battlefi eld right at the heart of the visual regime, where, as Guy Debord prognoses it decades earlier, the visual becomes the fetish of dead and deadening certainties. We must go to the heart of the globalized capitalist “society of spectacle” because that is where every pain is transformed into passing visual pleasure of the highest bidder. Look at Shirin Neshat and her appropriation by collectors, curators, journalistic art critics, or else by anthropologists. Art is the transformation of trace into sign (Derrida), where the truth of the visual allows for the reverse move: from the sign to the trace, the dust, the debris, the factual site of Khavaran in the deadly vicinities of Tehran as upstream from Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Capital as the validation of Europeanized modernity has from its very inception been globalized, marking the site of any (and all) contempo- rary art as the locus classicus of sellable debris, while reproductive hetero- normativity remains the tacit globalization of the Mommy–Baby–Daddy triumvirate (Christianity secularized at the service of capitalism) declared long before the capital went visually global. That hetero was and remains the other of auto , not homo . Nowadays we can have hetero-, auto-, or homo-normative reproductively, and the promiscuous logic of capital- ism will buy and sell them all. The more urgent question is, What about the massive systematicity of the present, of the now, of the everlasting INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 13

“new?” The simultaneous necessity and impossibility of any meaningful critique—rather than the radical piety that postcolonial critics like Gayatri Spivak fl aunts as passivism, always skirting the issue—does not abrogate responsibility. Consider the confl icting sites of cinema between Cannes and Kandahar, between red carpet high culture of the European bour- geoisie out on a soirée and the bloody trail of misery it screens. On these mutually exclusive sites as careerist fi lmmakers will make their careers, the murderous Taliban stage theirs, and the US military manages to subcon- tract its torture industry, we are left with the debris of all these trajectories, determined to make sense of a senseless world. The sense and sensibility are made only possible if we take the commercial debris of the capital as the allegories of an aesthetic intuition that can transcend to overcome it. My contention in this book is to argue the active, however implicit, formation of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence that is poised to over- come both (1) the postcolonial reason, and (2) the colonial modernity that had occasioned it. As the current condition of the amorphous capital needs people to exploit and art to distract the banality of its own boredom, we still have the active memory of the time when art served a purpose on its habitually parapublic sphere long before and long beyond the reach of Sotheby or any other art auctioneer or gallery could buy or sell its debris. That active memory will not degenerate into nostalgia if it is rooted in the debris the culture and art industry have consistently left behind. From the multiple phases in which art has performed varied subversive roles, to the rise of the commodity fetishism as the work of art, spreads and dwells an allegorical momentum that in this book I wish to call and consider an aesthetic intuition of transcendence, when art, found and lost, bought and sold, leaves traces of itself like the dust of those broken bones and murdered dreams in Khavaran and Sabra and Shatila mass graves, remem- bers itself having had a self-effacing purpose, which was far from being compromised by any politics, for it was the foregrounding of the always already next horizon of the political.

A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY Let us now work our preliminary way toward the manner in which this aesthetic intuition of transcendence manifests itself in various and multiple social movements. Consider the most recent example of such movements. In what sense do we consider it a movement? The late Muslim revolu- tionary Mehdi Bazargan (1908–1995) is reported once to have said the 14 H. DABASHI leader of the 1977–1979 revolution was the Shah, meaning whatever he did decided the revolutionary course of action the people adopted. In that sense, the leader of the Green Movement was the Islamic Republic and its entire state apparatus. The crisis-laden disposition of the Islamic Republic has now come back to haunt it and deprive it of any legitimate claim to national sovereignty. This is a regime that was founded on either creating crisis (such as the Hostage Crisis) or else taking advantage of crisis others created (the Iraqi invasion of Iran, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon). Now that very logic keeps creating its own crisis, crisis that the ruling regime cannot control, and has therefore just radically compromised the Iranian national sovereignty by saving itself through a nuclear deal that effectively subjects the Iranian nuclear energy program under intrusive inspections no sovereign state would ever allow. From its periodic democratic spec- tacles of elections, to varied phases of women’s rights struggle, to mul- tiple student revolts, labor unrests, to regional and global relations, the Islamic Republic has always been a contested ruling regime. By virtue of this crisis-laden record, it exposes its systematic, hallowed, contrapuntal, and negational character. The geopolitics of the region can be at once revealing and conceal- ing this internal dynamic of state illegitimacy. Judging by the mid-June 2009 massive post-presidential election uprising, the Islamic Republic looked at the brink of collapse. A mere half a decade later, by mid-2015, the fortunes of the beleaguered theocracy seems to have changed dras- tically and it appeared as a formidable force in the region, presumed widely to be so powerful that its neighboring Arab ruling regimes and their Israeli partner began to worry about the resurrection of “the Persian Empire.” How accurate was that assumption of the internal fra- gility, and how true are the assumptions of its regional power? Where is Iran headed, what are its strengths and weaknesses, on its internal, regional, and global scenes? How do we make a distinction between its ruling regimes and its vibrant population? Does the robust inter- nal opposition to the ruling regime strengthen or weaken it? Have we already entered the phase of a renewed signifi cance for an ancient civi- lization in its topography of power and politics, culture and industry? These are the key questions that are categorically absent in the current debates about the Iran nuclear deal, and yet are precisely the terms that connect the Green Movement to the will if a nation to engage in diplo- macy against the entrenched ill will of those who oppose it in Tehran, Tel Aviv, or Washington, DC. INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION 15

The prospect of a nuclear deal between Iran and the USA and its European allies had renewed the signifi cance of Iran on global platform. Against all odds, the US President Barack Obama was single-mindedly pursuing a diplomacy of rapprochement with Iran that could very well be his lasting legacy (on par with President Nixon’s China initiative or the SALT Treaty) and perhaps alter the geopolitics of the region for generations to come. The Saudi and Israeli governments had come out with their longstanding collaborations against the Iranian infl uence in the region, thus leaving the signifi cance of the Palestinian cause and the “Arab–Israeli confl ict” behind. The rising signifi cance of Iran in the region had not been an overnight success for them or concern for others. It had been achieved via shrewd politics under duress over the course of the ruling regime’s entire history since the success of the Iranian revolution in 1977–1979 and the Islamists’ outmaneuvering all their rivals. That Iran was now spoken of as an “empire,” however fl awed that assumption might have been, was the sign of its extraordinary regional power to alter the course of a global confi guration of politics in the region. Iran had now emerged as a regional powerhouse, not as much because of its revolutionary promises but on the ruins of the catastrophic policies of the USA and its European and regional allies, of which it was now a singular benefi ciary. But whatever be its deep- rooted causes and history, the future of that regional power demonstrated far-reaching global consequences. The state was thus paradoxically placed to be the benefi ciary of the regional politics not despite but in fact because of its robust internal opposition, staged for the whole world to see during the Green Movement. The mere possibility of a US–Iran rapprochement had exposed a much larger domain of confl uence between the USA, EU, and Iranian interests, much to the chagrin of Israel and many failing and vulnerable Arab states. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that a US–Iran detente would be the biggest geopolitical event affecting the future of the region at large for generations to come. As a sign of this transformative relation of power, the Arab regional rivalries with Iran had increasingly assumed ethnic nation- alistic and sectarian Sunni–Shi’i overtones. Meanwhile in art and industry, hard sciences and demographic infrastructure Iran was poised as the most powerful nation against the backdrop of a vastly crumbling postcolonial map of “the Middle East”—with a sizable but not unruly population on par with India or China, and yet not as small and vulnerable as almost all its neighbors. From the Green Movement of 2009, to the Arab Spring of 2011, to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), to regional 16 H. DABASHI signifi cance in 2013, the region seemed in the midst of world-historic changes and Iran was an increasingly dominant force in these unfolding events, not just because of its political and military signifi cance in mul- tiple Arab settings but far more crucially because of its vibrant, defi ant, and politically alert population. Ever since the Green Movement of 2009, it was increasingly obvious that we needed to make a fateful distinction between the ruling Islamic Republic and the robust nation it wished but failed completely to represent. In this book, I wish to provide a provocative reading of Iran in its current geostrategic signifi cance, paying simultaneous attention to both its internal and external dynamics, bringing the two together to see how the fate of the nation is being drastically altered. I intend to produce a succinct account of the resurrection of Iran as a powerful nation (not a nation-state) against the backdrop of a widely dismantled regional geopolitics, allowing for hidden and repressed political and cultural forces to surface and redefi ne the future history. Iran and its environ are undergoing deep-rooted and wide-ranging changes in the twenty-fi rst century, and the existing modalities, paradigms, and analytical tools have become completely outdated and cliché-ridden, regurgitated senselessly by politicians, journalists, and area studies scholars alike. When the Green Movement in Iran took place in June 2009, I thought the task at hand for those deeply committed to the civil rights in Iran and its region at large to offer a perspective from the necessary and inevitable distance of the globality of our perspective, theoretically strengthening the movement in a language radically different from the current clichés. Predicated on this premise, the pattern I will follow in this book is decidedly zigzagging between the regional and the domestic scenes, though increasingly coming out toward a global perspective on national liberation movements that are transnational in their origin, destinations, and vantage points. Birth of postcolonial nation-states from the ruins of Muslim Empires has been always precarious with porous borders, making it impossible to tell the fate of any nation in terms domestic to its dynamics. Over the last 300 years plus, these porous borders have been defi nitive to colonial and postcolonial history of the region at large. These porous borders have to do with fateful encounters between the dying Muslim Empires of Mughals, the Safavids/Qajars, and the Ottomans, on one hand, and the encroachment of European Empires on the other. The active imagination and the aesthetic reason at the formative roots of these postcolonial nations have always outstripped their material foundations, political wherewithal,