Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity demonstrates these fissures and the incompatibilities that refuse to be written out of national culture, analysing works of literature, popular music, graphic art and film, as well as oral narratives. Using works produced before and after the 1979 revolution, created both inside and outside of Iran, this study reveals neglected complexities and contradictions in the field of Iranian cultural production. It considers how contested claims to culture, whether they originated in Iran or the Iranian diaspora, shape our understanding of this culture and what spaces they create for new articulations of it, and in doing so offers an important re-examination of our collective concept of culture.

Nasrin Rahimieh is the Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her teaching and research are focused on modern Persian literature and culture. She is author of Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural Identity.

Introduction Chapter One Back to the Future: Time Travel and Iranian Identity Chapter Two: Shooting the Past, Staging the Revolution Chapter Three Stage Managing the Return of the Repressed Chapter Four From the Displaced to the Misplaced Chapter Five The Hen's Husband, or Deterritorializations of Persian Chapter Six Illuminating Internal Alterities Conclusion