This talk assembles an archive of significant expressions of social discontent with Iranian national development, spanning from the early twentieth century to the 1979 Revolution, examining both canonical and popular culture through literary and political texts and film. It argues that the figure of the dandy emerged among these critiques as a symbol of cultural alienation and superficial modernity. The talk explores how anxieties surrounding modern gender shifts inform these critiques. It also examines how these critiques—interpreted here as various formulations of cultural alienation—compare to their global counterparts. It further considers how, despite a shared focus, these critiques and the narratives of the nation they produced change in response to shifting historical circumstances. Furthermore, based on these critiques, the dandy can be understood as a transgressor of both the metaphorical border with the West and gender norms. Ultimately, this raises the question: Were these critiques aimed at preserving gender and national boundaries, or did they contain strands aspiring toward a new form of consciousness that moves beyond the dichotomy between the national self and the West?
Mina Kanlarzadeh is a historian specializing in the modern Middle East. She is currently an associated EUME Fellow as well as a Temporal Communities Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2021-2023, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the history of science and technology at Northwestern University. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and her research interests include literary and cultural studies, gender and sexuality, intellectual history, and critical theory. Her academic work has been published in journals such as Religions and Popular Music and Society, among others.
Yvonne Albers is a postdoctoral researcher and academic coordinator at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective at Freie Universität Berlin and is an affiliated EUME Fellow (2021-25). Her current research focuses on time and temporality in/of Arab periodicals since the 1960s. Her recent book, an intellectual biography of the Beirut-based cultural magazine Mawaqif (1968-1994), has just been published (Brill 2023).
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