Since the age of the Sasanian Empire (224-651 AD), Iran and the West have time and again appeared to be at odds. Iran and the West charts this contentious and complex relationship by examining the myriad ways the two have perceived each other, from antiquity to today. Across disciplines, perspectives and periods contributors consider literary, imagined, mythical, visual, filmic, political and historical representations of the 'other' and the ways in which these have been constructed in, and often in spite of, their specific historical contexts. Many of these narratives, for example, have their origin in the ancient world but have since been altered, recycled and manipulated to fit a particular agenda. Ranging from Tacitus, Leonidas and Xerxes via Shahriar Mandanipour and Azar Nafisi to Rosewater, Argo and 300, this inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging volume is essential reading for anyone working on the complex history, present and future of Iranian-Western relations.
Author(s): Margaux Whiskin (Editor), David Bagot (Editor)
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 368
Tags: Iran, Persia, West, Cultural relations
Cover
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
I. Classical representations
1. Tacitus and the Great Kings
2. Roman and Iranian perceptions of the other in Late Antiquity
3. Xerxes and Leonidas: Conversations between ancient Persia and sevententh-century France in Fénelon’s Dialogue of the dead
II. Literary representations
4. Saadi’s perception of the West and German translators’ perception of Iran in Saadi’s Gulistan
5. ʻParisian or Persian?’ An introduction on the French roots of the first Iranian social novels
6. ʻOur white hands,’ Iran and Germany’s 1968
7. Entrapped in a carved-up land: Revisiting Reading Lolita in Tehran
8. ʻDeath to freedom, death to captivity’: Beyond Shahriar Mandanipour’s ʻislamic’ love story
9. Homeland dramatisations and native gaze demolitions in Nahid Rachlin’s Foreigner and Porochista Khakpou’s Sons and other flammable objects
III. Imagining the other: fact and fantasy in cultural and political influences
10. Tbilisi as a bridge between Iran and Europe, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries
11. Generational differences: American medical missionaries in Iran, 1834-1940
12. A narrative of historical and cultural ties between Iran and Romania
13. The great satan and the axis of evil: The politics of demonisation in Iran and the United States
IV. Visual and media representations
14. Zan-i farangi, a symbol of occident: the European women in farangi sazi paintings (1666-94)
15. Meeting of anthropology and racial ideology in Hollywood: discovering ʻthe forgotten people’ and remembering ʻthe lost tribe’ in Grass (1925)
16. ʻSoraya cried for three days’: The many faces of Iranian-German royalty in the German popular press in the 1950s and 1960s
17. Persepolis: The shah’s national fiction
18. Vampires, veils and the Western gaze: gender images and the notion of beauty from Qajar to post-revolutionary Iran
Afterword: Isfahan 1976-8: A personal recollection
Bibliography
Index
