logo for Harvard University Press
Tales from Luristan
Sekandar Amanolahi
Harvard University Press, 1986
Little is known of the Luri dialect of Khurramabad, but Professor Amanolahi of Shiraz University has collected various stories from his native town in the local language. Together with Wheeler Thackston of Harvard he has prepared a compact volume covering the tales in transcription, translations into English, a short grammatical sketch, and a Luri-English vocabulary (Luristan is a province of western Iran in the Zagros Mountains). The traditional grammatical analysis of the dialect is easy to follow and the translations of both poetry and prose closely follow the original, a tribute to the close collaboration of the two scholars. This unique volume will be of great interest to students of the folklore, linguistics, and customs of the inhabitants of the center of Luristan.
[more]

front cover of Tehrangeles Dreaming
Tehrangeles Dreaming
Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music
Farzaneh Hemmasi
Duke University Press, 2020
Los Angeles, called Tehrangeles because it is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, is the birthplace of a distinctive form of postrevolutionary pop music. Created by professional musicians and media producers fleeing Iran's revolutionary-era ban on “immoral” popular music, Tehrangeles pop has been a part of daily life for Iranians at home and abroad for decades. In Tehrangeles Dreaming Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the songs, music videos, and television made in Tehrangeles express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran. Exploring Tehrangeles pop producers' complex commercial and political positioning and the histories, sensations, and fantasies their music makes available to global Iranian audiences, Hemmasi shows how unquestionably Iranian forms of Tehrangeles popular culture exemplify the manner in which culture, media, and diaspora combine to respond to the Iranian state and its political transformations. The transnational circulation of Tehrangeles culture, she contends, transgresses Iran's geographical, legal, and moral boundaries while allowing all Iranians the ability to imagine new forms of identity and belonging.
[more]

front cover of This Flame Within
This Flame Within
Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States
Manijeh Moradian
Duke University Press, 2022
In This Flame Within Manijeh Moradian revises conventional histories of Iranian migration to the United States as a post-1979 phenomenon characterized by the flight of pro-Shah Iranians from the Islamic Republic and recounts the experiences of Iranian foreign students who joined a global movement against US imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on archival evidence and in-depth interviews with members of the Iranian Students Association, Moradian traces what she calls “revolutionary affects”—the embodied force of affect generated by experiences of repression and resistance—from encounters with empire and dictatorship in Iran to joint organizing with other student activists in the United States. Moradian theorizes “affects of solidarity” that facilitated Iranian student participation in a wide range of antiracist and anticolonial movements and analyzes gendered manifestations of revolutionary affects within the emergence of Third World feminism. Arguing for a transnational feminist interpretation of the Iranian Student Association’s legacy, Moradian demonstrates how the recognition of multiple sources of oppression in the West and in Iran can reorient Iranian diasporic politics today.
[more]

front cover of Treasures of Herat
Treasures of Herat
Two Manuscripts of the Khamsah of Nizami in the British Library
Barbara Brend
Gingko, 2021
An illustrated reference book for students and scholars of Persian art, poetry, and literature.

With this book, Barbara Brend provides thorough consideration of two celebrated Persian manuscripts housed in the British Library. These two copies of the Khamsah (Quintet) a set of five narrative poems by twelfth-century poet Nizami, a master of allegorical poetry in Persian literature, were produced in Herat in the fifteenth century, one of the greatest periods of Persian painting. Although well known, the manuscripts have never before been written about in relation to each other. Brend tells the story of each poem and the painting that illustrates it, and she formally analyzes the images, placing them in their historical and artistic context.
 
The images from both highly prized manuscripts are beautifully reproduced in color, and the ownership history of one of the manuscripts—recorded in the form of seal impressions and inscriptions— is also included. Ursula Sims-Williams provides a translation and commentary of these important marks of ownership which identify the Mughal rulers Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, among many others.
 
[more]

front cover of Tremors
Tremors
New Fiction by Iranian American Writers
Anita Amirrezvani
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
This groundbreaking anthology brings together twenty-seven authors from a wide range of experiences that offer new perspectives on the Iranian American story. The authors in Tremors represent the maturing voice of Iranian American fiction from the vantage point of those who were born and raised in Iran, as well as those writers who reflect a more distant, but still important, connection to their Iranian heritage. Altogether, these narratives capture the diversity of the Iranian diaspora and complicate the often-narrow view of Iranian culture represented in the media. The stories and novel excerpts explore the deeply human experiences of one of the newest immigrant groups to the United States in its attempts to adjust and assimilate in the face of major historical upheavals such as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the hostage crisis, and the attacks of September 11, 2001. The stories set in Iran testify to the resilience, dignity, and humor of a people rich in history and culture.
[more]



Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter