Download or read book Persia Reframed written by Fereshteh Daftari and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern and contemporary art of Iran has often been understood, and positioned by commercial institutions, as decorative or ethnic--hence the focus on calligraphy and veiled women. While at a scholarly level it has been characterised as a comment on the socio-political context of the country: repressed inside Iran and, among artists in diaspora, as a focus for a complex identity discourse. Viewing Iranian art as neither a commodity, nor an illustration of theory, Fereshteh Daftari approaches the modern art of Iran as a democratic space where pluralism--a range of different styles and ideas--can thrive. This art historical exploration offers new insights into Iranian art, from the late 19th century Qajar period, via the Saqqakhaneh movement of the 1960s and into the contemporary world. In the process the author comments on the concept of modernism in a non-Western environment. She takes both a specific and a panoramic view of Iranian art to expose new themes like the subversive appropriation of traditional art, whilst also tackling more perennial issues like gender. With experience as an international curator, Daftari analyses the way Iranian artists have been represented outside the country and discusses the different routes by which modern Iranian art has been introduced to a Western audience, explaining the process by which Iranian art has developed and how it navigates between the individual and the political.
Download or read book Persia Reframed written by Fereshteh Daftari and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern and contemporary art of Iran has often been understood, and positioned by commercial institutions, as decorative or ethnic – hence the focus on calligraphy and veiled women. At a scholarly level it has been characterized as a comment on the socio-political context of the country. Viewing Iranian art as neither a commodity, nor an illustration of theory, Fereshteh Daftari approaches the modern art of Iran as a democratic space where pluralism – a range of different styles and ideas – can thrive. This art historical exploration offers new insights into Iranian art, from the late nineteenth century Qajar period, via the Saqqakhaneh movement of the 1960s and into the contemporary world. In the process the author comments on the concept of modernism in a non-Western environment and the shifting meanings of abstraction. She takes both a specific and a panoramic view of Iranian art to expose new themes such as the subversive appropriation of traditional art, whilst also tackling more perennial issues such as gender. With experience as an international curator, Daftari reviews the representations of Iranian artists outside the country and discusses the varied angles from which she has introduced the art to a Western audience. She explains how in the process she has steered clear of contentious rubrics, valorized contemporary media, and probed the complex relation between the individual and the political.
Download or read book Iran Reframed written by Narges Bajoghli and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Middle East scholar shares an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the debates around the future of the Islamic Republic. More than half of Iran’s citizens were not alive at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Now entering its fifth decade in power, the Iranian regime faces the paradox of any successful revolution: how to transmit the commitments of its political project to the next generation. New media ventures supported by the Islamic Republic attempt to win the hearts and minds of younger Iranians. Yet members of this new generation―whether dissidents or fundamentalists―are increasingly skeptical of these efforts. Iran Reframed offers unprecedented access to those who wield power in Iran as they debate and define the future of the Republic. Over ten years, Narges Bajoghli met with men in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ansar Hezbollah, and Basij paramilitary organizations to investigate how their media producers developed strategies to court Iranian youth. Readers come to know these men―what the regime means to them and their anxieties about the future of their revolutionary project. This book offers a multilayered story about what it means to be pro-regime in the Islamic Republic, challenging everything we think we know about Iran and revolution.
Download or read book Iran Modern written by Fereshteh Daftari and published by Asia Society Museum. This book was released on 2013 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Iran Modern' offers a timely exploration of the cultural diversity and production of avant-garde art in Iran after World War II and up to the revolution, from 1950 through to 1979.
Download or read book Persian Fire written by Tom Holland and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-06-12 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "fresh...thrilling" (The Guardian) account of the Graeco-Persian Wars. In the fifth century B.C., a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took on the Great King of Persia, and thereby saved not only themselves but Western civilization as well, is as heart-stopping and fateful as any episode in history. Tom Holland’s brilliant study of these critical Persian Wars skillfully examines a conflict of critical importance to both ancient and modern history.
Download or read book These Chains Will Be Broken written by Ramzy Baroud and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ramzy Baroud's book of Palestinian prisoners' stories is a remarkable work. With each story, there is a roll-call of the best of humanity. courage, struggle, determination, generosity, passion, humility .. Everyone should read this searing and beautiful book." JOHN PILGER “... you will delve into the lives of men and women, read intimate stories that they have chosen to share with you, stories that may surprise you, anger you and even shock you. But they are crucial stories that must be told, read and retold." KHALIDA JARRAR, Palestine Legislative Council "The rationale for Palestinian resistance is heightened by having law and morality on the side of demands for an end to the oppressive Israeli occupation and the persistent abuse of fundamental Palestinian rights...." RICHARD FALK, former UN Special Rapporteur, Prof. Emeritus, Princeton Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have experienced life in Israel's prisons since 1967, as did many more in previous decades during the course of the ongoing Israeli military occupation. Yet rarely has the story of their experiences in Israeli jails been told by the prisoners themselves. Typically the Western media portrays them as ‘terrorists’ while well-meaning third-party human rights advocates paint them as hapless victims. They are neither. This book permits the reader to access the reality of Palestinian imprisonment as told by Palestinian prisoners themselves -- stories of appalling suffering and determination to reclaim their freedom. The stories in this book are not meant to serve as an account of Israeli torture methods. Instead, each story highlights a distinct experience -- each so personal, so profound -- in order to underline the humanity of those who are constantly dehumanized by Israeli hasbara and the mainstream corporate media’s biased accounts.. Palestinian prisoners are an essential element in the collective resistance against Israeli colonialism, apartheid and military occupation. Rather than being viewed as unfortunate victims, their steadfastness exemplifies the ongoing fight of the Palestinian people as a whole. In reality, all Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and siege are also prisoners. The Gaza Strip is often referred to as the “world’s largest open-air prison.” It is in this context that this book becomes an essential read
Download or read book Islamophobia written by Duffner, Jordan Denari and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book discusses the international and historical roots of Islamophobia and its connection to Christianity and lays out a proposed Christian response"--
Download or read book Drugs Politics written by Maziyar Ghiabi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers new and cutting-edge research on the role of drugs in Iranian society and government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Download or read book No Path Home written by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-15 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition. No Path Home describes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart. After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. In No Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.
Download or read book The Coup written by Ervand Abrahamian and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “absorbing” account of the CIA’s 1953 coup in Iran—essential reading for anyone concerned about Iran’s role in the world today (Harper’s Magazine). In August 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated the swift overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader and installed Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in his place. When the 1979 Iranian Revolution deposed the shah and replaced his puppet government with a radical Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the shift reverberated throughout the Middle East and the world, casting a long, dark shadow over United States-Iran relations that extends to the present day. In this authoritative new history of the coup and its aftermath, noted Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian uncovers little-known documents that challenge conventional interpretations and sheds new light on how the American role in the coup influenced diplomatic relations between the two countries, past and present. Drawing from the hitherto closed archives of British Petroleum, the Foreign Office, and the US State Department, as well as from Iranian memoirs and published interviews, Abrahamian’s riveting account of this key historical event will change America’s understanding of a crucial turning point in modern United States-Iranian relations. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title “Not only is this book important because of its presentation of history. It is also important because it might be predicting the future.” —Counterpunch “Subtle, lucid, and well-proportioned.” —The Spectator “A valuable corrective to previous work and an important contribution to Iranian history.” —American Historical Review
Download or read book The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran written by Katrin Nahidi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist Iranian art represents a highly diverse field of cultural production deeply involved in discussing questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. This book investigates how artistic production and art criticism reflected upon the discourse about gharbzadegi (westoxification), the most substantial critique of Iran's adaptation of Western modernity, and ultimately proved to be a laboratory for the negotiation of an anti-colonial concept of an Iranian artistic modernity, which artists and critics envisioned as a significant other to Western colonial modernity. In this book, Katrin Nahidi revisits Iranian modernist art, aiming to explore a political and contextualized interpretation of modernism. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Nahidi provides a history of modernist art production since the 1950s and reveals the complex political agency underlying art historiographical processes. Offering a key contribution to postcolonial art history, Nahidi shows how Iranian artistic modernity was used to flesh out anti-colonial concepts and ideas around Iranian national identity.
Download or read book Alternative Iran written by Pamela Karimi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative Iran offers a unique contribution to the field of contemporary art, investigating how Iranian artists engage with space and site amid the pressures of the art market and the state's regulatory regimes. Since the 1980s, political, economic, and intellectual forces have driven Iran's creative class toward increasingly original forms of artmaking not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in private homes with "trusted" audiences, derelict buildings, leftover urban zones, and remote natural sites. While many of these venues operate independently, others are fully sanctioned by the state. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater experts, musicians, and designers, Pamela Karimi throws into sharp relief the extraordinary art and performance activities that have received little attention outside Iran. Attending to nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, Karimi discloses the push-and-pull between the art community and the authorities, and discusses myriad instances of tentative coalition as opposed to outright partnership or uncompromising resistance. Illustrated with more than 120 full-color images, this book provides entry into unique artistic experiences without catering to voyeuristic curiosity around Iran's often-perceived "underground" culture.
Download or read book Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts written by Basia Sliwinska and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn's artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority. The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms. Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen
Download or read book What is Iran written by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the domestic politics and international relations of Iran, unique in its use of art, poetry and music.
Download or read book Reading Revolutionary Iran written by Ze'ev Maghen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-03-06 with total page 1047 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burden of this book is twofold. The first half is charged with identifying and critiquing the many prejudices and misconceptions that inform popular – and even scholarly – perceptions of Islam and Iran, those rooted in neo-conservative hostility no less than those arising out of pro-regime apologetics or (what we will argue are) misleading "post-modern" methodologies. This is a key component of our overall investigation, both because the illusions occluding our view of the Islamic Republic are (we assert) piled so high and deep, and because setting the record straight on many a contentious issue is the most appropriate context for elucidating the positive positions of the revolutionary clerics. These last represent, perhaps more than anything else, the premier critics of Western civilization in our day, and their ideologies may therefore be best comprehended when placed in dialogue with, and in polemic against, the worldviews of that civilization (which in their own turn are often most profoundly understood when offset by their present-day Islamist nemeses). As noted above, it is not all contention: unexpected meeting points and congruities emerge, as well, when the activist Shi'ite clerics are placed in the same virtual room with their occidental counterweights. The second half of the book deploys a large number of rarely tapped primary sources, both ancient and contemporary, in order to tease out the attitudes of the class of Muslim scholars recently and currently at the helm of the Iranian state in a variety of significant fields, including the role of religion in society, the relationship between democracy and theocracy, the modern Western Weltanschauung, the Sunni-Shi'i schism, and much more. Though the author parses, and provides background and context for, the myriad citations from these influential Muslim thinkers, the ultimate objective is to allow them to speak for themselves.
Download or read book Midnight in Cairo The Divas of Egypt s Roaring 20s written by Raphael Cormack and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant portrait of the talented and entrepreneurial women who defined an era in Cairo. One of the world’s most multicultural cities, twentieth-century Cairo was a magnet for the ambitious and talented. During the 1920s and ’30s, a vibrant music, theater, film, and cabaret scene flourished, defining what it meant to be a “modern” Egyptian. Women came to dominate the Egyptian entertainment industry—as stars of the stage and screen but also as impresarias, entrepreneurs, owners, and promoters of a new and strikingly modern entertainment industry. Raphael Cormack unveils the rich histories of independent, enterprising women like vaudeville star Rose al-Youssef (who launched one of Cairo’s most important newspapers); nightclub singer Mounira al-Mahdiyya (the first woman to lead an Egyptian theater company) and her great rival, Oum Kalthoum (still venerated for her soulful lyrics); and other fabulous female stars of the interwar period, a time marked by excess and unheard-of freedom of expression. Buffeted by crosswinds of colonialism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, “religious” and “secular” values, patriarchy and feminism, this new generation of celebrities offered a new vision for women in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.
Download or read book Without Boundary written by Fereshteh Daftari and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 2006 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to speak of a contemporary art with an Islamic difference? This question is the subject of an exhibition that brings together artists who come from the Islamic world. Tapping into certain aesthetic, political, and spiritual notions, this book seeks to highlight the nuanced reactions of each individual artist.
