Representing the Unrepresentable : Historical Images of Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran
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TextProducer: Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota 1998Subject(s): Online resources: Abstract: Representing the Unpresentable attempts to show that late Qajar Iran was a furiously turbulent era, with the introduction of modern technology, and new ways of imagining the state and religion. Iran's sense of its national identity was also in turmoil. This turbulence articulated itself in the shifting perceptions of European and Iranian women. It was in the context of debates around the formulation of the nation's identity that the Babi--a follower of Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab--came to stand as the marker of the modern Iranian subject, the foreign subject. Any tangible object, such as articles of clothing, that could mark difference came to define this "foreigner within". The unrest combined with the traumatic public massacre of the Babis in which all classes of Iranians were forced to participate in the elimination of another of their own class. Representing the Unpresentable argues that this combination of forces situated 'the Babi', in the figure of the unveiled poet Qurrat al-'Ayn Tahirih, as an overdetermined, unpresentable image through which contemporary notions of Iranian identity took root. This has relevance for current conditions in Iran in the 1990s. Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is used to shape and project Iranian national identity, internally and externally. It does so, however, with a stubborn refusal to lift the veil even from the bodies of generations of women who never grew up veiled. Why? Representing the Unpresentable suggests that the Republic's claim to be protecting the image of Iran against the decadent Western representations of unveiled women is partial. It shows that the history of the national image is rooted in an intimate and early exchange with both the East and the West, even if these were sometimes imagined partners. The ban on lifting the veil must be recognized as aimed against what is closest. Against the self. Against what might happen if the nation were to recognize the unveiled identity of Iran as Iran's own. This recognition would mean owning up to collective trauma of the near extermination of the self in the image of Iran's unveiled internal other over a century ago.
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Representing the Unpresentable attempts to show that late Qajar Iran was a furiously turbulent era, with the introduction of modern technology, and new ways of imagining the state and religion. Iran's sense of its national identity was also in turmoil. This turbulence articulated itself in the shifting perceptions of European and Iranian women. It was in the context of debates around the formulation of the nation's identity that the Babi--a follower of Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab--came to stand as the marker of the modern Iranian subject, the foreign subject. Any tangible object, such as articles of clothing, that could mark difference came to define this "foreigner within". The unrest combined with the traumatic public massacre of the Babis in which all classes of Iranians were forced to participate in the elimination of another of their own class. Representing the Unpresentable argues that this combination of forces situated 'the Babi', in the figure of the unveiled poet Qurrat al-'Ayn Tahirih, as an overdetermined, unpresentable image through which contemporary notions of Iranian identity took root. This has relevance for current conditions in Iran in the 1990s. Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is used to shape and project Iranian national identity, internally and externally. It does so, however, with a stubborn refusal to lift the veil even from the bodies of generations of women who never grew up veiled. Why? Representing the Unpresentable suggests that the Republic's claim to be protecting the image of Iran against the decadent Western representations of unveiled women is partial. It shows that the history of the national image is rooted in an intimate and early exchange with both the East and the West, even if these were sometimes imagined partners. The ban on lifting the veil must be recognized as aimed against what is closest. Against the self. Against what might happen if the nation were to recognize the unveiled identity of Iran as Iran's own. This recognition would mean owning up to collective trauma of the near extermination of the self in the image of Iran's unveiled internal other over a century ago.