[ecrea] CFP: Culture and Cultural Production in Iran: Past and Present

School of Modern Languages and Institute of Iranian Studies
University of St Andrews
Call for Conference Papers
 ‘Culture and Cultural Production in Iran: Past and Present’
(17th, 18th and 19th June 2016)
Convener: Dr Saeed Talajooy 
<(st83 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)<mailto:(st83 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)>>

This conference aspires to encourage the application of the evolving 
approaches to the study of culture to the history of artistic production 
in Iran. The unifying element of the conference, therefore, is artistic 
cultural production and the spaces in which it has occurred as an 
aesthetic, economic, socio-political phenomenon in Iran, particularly 
during the last two hundred years. We welcome a variety of submissions: 
from those that offer overviews of a particular form in a given period, 
to very specific studies of individual artists, works, practices, or 
material culture. We are also interested in the role these cultural 
products have played in the expansion of the concept of art and ‘the 
redistribution of the sensible’— what can be seen and heard in 
society due to the machination of political, cultural and religious 
aesthetics that confine these sounds and images in a hierarchical system 
of values. Of particular interest are also those papers that explore the 
theoretical aspects of the meaning and functions of art in Iran by 
studying specific topics. The conference, thus aims to encourage 
analytical and theoretical discussions on the multiplicity of locations 
that art (literature, cinema, theatre, music, dance, visual arts, 
architecture, etc.) occupies in Iranian discourse on modernity and 
post-industrial contemporaneity.
The following is a tentative list of general themes that speakers may 
choose to address while researching specific topics, but other subjects 
or approaches will also be welcomed:

• What is ‘Farhang’? Is there a divide between a popular and an 
elite culture? Who possesses culture?

• What is art? Where does it occur? How has it been received and 
promoted in Iran since the 1800s?

• Visual arts and the transformation and idealization of the body;

• The museum as a space and as an art form; collecting and buying art 
products;

• Cultural production and royal/clerical modernity in the late Qajar, 
Pahlavi and post-revolution era;

• What is ‘the contemporary’ and when did it begin in its Iranian 
context? What is contemporary art (literature, music, drama, dance, 
visual arts, architecture, etc.)?

• Mimicry, theatricality and theatrical politics: theatre, cinema, and 
their socio-political doubles;

• Music, dance and the rise of public space; music, dance, and 
culture; women on the stage;

• Transformation of the concept of  art as a prerequisite for modernity;

• The art of subversion through historicist, cross-cultural, and 
folkloric reformulation and adaptation;

• Art as a public space for socio-political inquiry; and history 
writing as an art form;

• The birth of the new concept of ‘the individual’ in Iranian art;

• The rebirth of Tehran as a modern/Islamic modern/contemporary 
metropolis: immigrants, minorities, marginality, coups, foreign 
occupation, Islamic transformations and artistic production;

• The expansion of the public space through architecture, theatre, 
cinema, opera, ballet, concerts, night club dance and performance, 
reformulated religious rituals, marketing and religious murals, etc.;

• Marxism, art and modernity; Islamism, art and modernity; 
Existentialism, art and modernity; Capitalism, consumerism and art; 
Nation, nation-building and nationalism in Iranian art;

• Comparative studies of Iranian and non-Iranian art (fiction, music, 
dance, poetry, drama, visual arts, architecture, etc.) with a focus on 
the meaning of the modern or the contemporary;

• Publication, distribution , canonization and festivals and their 
roles in the reformulation of the culture;

• Transformation of family, individual and society in cultural products,

• Women as the subject and producers of Iranian art;

• Modern history and art as a secular space to display cosmopolitanism;

• Rereading history, religion or myth in Iranian art;

• Revolution as performance; streets and homes, indoor and outdoor, 
social control and metamorphosis;

• Indigenous artistic traditions and negotiating the relationship 
between the past and the present.

Confirmed Speakers include:

Bahram Beyzaie (Cinema)
Ahmad Karimi Hakkak  (Literature)
Ali Ansari (History)
Mohamad Tavakoli Targhi (History)
Hamid Amjad (Theatre)
Saeed Talajooy (Theatre, Culture and Adaptation)
Jila Esamailian (Publication)
Naghmeh Samini (Writing for the screen in Iran: Shahrzad)
Hooman Asadi (Music)

Performance
Mojdeh Shamsaie

Please submit abstracts of between 250 and 300 words by 25th January 
2016 (Extended until 31st January). Authors will have 20 minutes to 
present their papers. A selection of papers will be chosen for further 
expansion and publication in an edited volume on Culture and Cultural 
Production in Iran. The abstracts must be electronically submitted to 
Saeed Talajooy <(st83 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)<mailto:(st83 /at/ st-andrews.ac.uk)>>.



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