Exploring motifs in modern Persian literature and Iranian film that demand new forms of relationality from politics

Assembling an understudied corpus of literary and filmic texts at the intersection of Persian and global modernism, Maziyar Faridi traces a constellation of aesthetic motifs that resist colonially imported constructs of political relationality in order to argue for an intermedial poetics of nonsovereignty. Moving from the poetry of Nima Yushij and Ahmad Shamlou to the ciné-poems of Férydoun Rahnéma and Forugh Farrokhzad, Nonsovereign Styles charts the transformation of poetic language through its exposure to minor ethnic languages and the rhetorics of English, French, and Spanish modernist poetry and alternative film. Faridi centers two key motifs: ezterāb, a trembling rhythm in which the self encounters itself as difference, and mehr, an aporetic mode of relation beyond identity, community, and sovereignty. Against the state’s project of ethnonationalism, these motifs form a poetics that is both transhistorical and transnational, producing a translational link between Iranian and internationalist poets, such as Langston Hughes and Paul Éluard. By situating Persian modernism within the broader map of global modernism, this book invites us to consider what reading these texts can teach us today about styles of relating to the world and the very sense of the political.

MAZIYAR FARIDI is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the World Cinema Program at Clemson University.

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Reading Otherwise, Relating Otherwise

Part I: Ezterāb

Chapter 1. On the Anxiety of the World: Ezterāb

Chapter 2. On the Melancholia of the Untimely: Bīgāhān

Part II: Mehr

Chapter 3. On Spectral Friendship: Mehr

Chapter 4. On Becoming-Leper: Rābeteh

Coda. Styles of Ezterāb: Tarz-e ezterāb

Acknowledgments 

Notes 

Filmography

Bibliography 

Index