Performance, Identity, and Cultural Practices in the Oral Histories of Three Generations of Iranian Women (original) (raw)
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Sociological Cultural Studies, 2019
Abstract Criticism of modernization and urbanization includes one of discursive approaches produced by artistic and literary works In Pahlavi era. This criticism that is present in a wide range of meaning systems of philosophical, artistic/ literary works, contends rural purity and innocence versus aliened and polluted cultures of modernized cities. One concrete example of this works, whose influence has remained up to now, is the City of Tales performance and play, composed by BijanMofid. This artistic/ literary work is embedded in Iranian people collective and contemporary memory. As such this work depicts an inter / multi-generational work that transcends time of its composition. This article is aimed to scrutinize discursive system and meaning of this play and draw a comparison between given play and other works that show a same discursive content and background of creation. It seems a same discursive meaning can be observed as the result of an inter-textual and interactional relationship between Iranian intellectuality and philosophical utterances and literary/artistic expressions through social context and backgrounds.
Semiotica Vol 145 1/4, 2003
Following Charles S. Peirce and Paul Friedrich, this paper attempts to deal with the concept of ‘performative symbols’—symbols that are realized when they are performed. This concept is explored through an investigation of the presentation of gender identity in two different forms of Iranian traditional theatre: the tragic epic form, ta’ziyeh, and the comic improvisatory form, ru-hozi. [keywords: Iran, ta’ziyeh, ru-hozi, symbols, arbitrariness, performance theory, gender identity]
The perceived shift of emphasis on performance studies to the contextual imperative necessitates a corresponding examination of approaches that have the potential to yield better results on contextual analysis of performances and society,(Magoulick:2014, Van der Aa and Blommaert: 2015). The ethnography on performance studies has therefore emphasized either the ethnography of performance or performance ethnography, two approaches that require in-depth immersion of the researcher in the target community's life and practices to enhance " interactive " and " insider " views of performance contexts in relation to cultural practices. These two approaches, however, still have limitations as D.S. Farrer (2007) observes. The possibilities and limitations of these approaches call for a deeper understanding of cultural praxis within target communities as means for the furtherance and explication of the intricacies of performance contexts. They also raise pertinent questions as to which of these approaches best explicates a society's culture. Through an appraisal of the Bakor oral narrative repertoire, this paper attempts an examination of the tenets of both approaches and posits that an integrative and/or collaborative selection of aspects of each approach, taking into cognizance the cultural landscape of the target community, will yield more positive results on how ethno-historical antecedents affect performance contexts and how performance techniques or styles and art-based research aid the construction of culture and identity.
Revisiting Iran through Women’s Memoirs: Alternative Narratives from Insider Within
GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies
Life narratives of the Iranian women in the diaspora, which have become very popular in recent years, have long served as a model for understanding Iran for western readers. This popularity is emanated from the curiosity and interest in the west that was raised after 9/11 and the ensuing political aftermath. Written to unveil the lives of Iranian women in the Islamic Republic, these diasporic narratives have been 'growingly commodified, circulated and consumed uncritically' in the west. Much ink has been spilled on the surge of diasporic Iranian women's life narratives, the politics of their reception and circulation in the west, and their liability to furthering imperialist ideologies. We have no intention of continuing the debate over how some of these life narratives facilitate and promote imperialistic agendas. Rather, we would like to embark on an untrodden path, a fascinating journey through the growing body of life narratives by and about Iranian women from inside the Islamic Republic, equipped with accounts that vitiate the orientalist assumptions and diasporic narratives' generalisations. This paper seeks to introduce and analyse these alternative narratives. By developing a theory of the 'insider within,' this paper exhibits how alternative narratives from within can serve as a better model for understanding Iran and Iranian women.
Acta humanitarica academiae Saulensis, 2024
The concept of identity is currently one of the most frequently examined in cultural studies. Identity refers to the identification of an individual with a certain unit based on signs that he/she consciously or subconsciously accepts as his/her own. There are two main currents in identity research; primordialism (essentialist approach) and instrumentalism (constructivist approach). In today’s individualized society, there is a shift in emphasis from primordiality, i.e. from that side of identity that is given, permanent, inherited, fixed, to instrumentality, i.e. to such a basis of identity that a person chooses, creates, or selects. The submitted research focuses on Iranian identity and its reflection in Western literature and the Iranian art of dance. Iran has an exceptional position in its region and influences global events with its policy. The question is what allowed the Persians to remain Persians for more than two and a half millennia. Persian identity is expressed mainly in spiritual power, poetry, and religion. The Persians gave the world poetry, miniatures, and carpets. From the point of view of production prosperity, all useless things. But that’s how they express themselves. They gave the world what did not serve to make life easier but to make it more beautiful (Kapuściński, 2016, p. 153). The empirical part of the research is divided into two parts. In the first part of the research, the authors focus on expressing Iranian identity in their traditional and modern dance. The Persian “classic” is characterized by an expressive movement of the upper part of the body, delicate movements of the shoulders and palms, and eloquent facial expressions. The dance is very poetic and often depicts scenes from Persian poems. The second part of the research focuses on examining how Iranian identity is reflected in Western literature. The study of Iranian identity is based on Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), who is a representative of Iranian anglophone immigrants, as well as on an unintentional tetralogy of novels by Betty Mahmoody, the author of the novels Not without my Daughter (1987) and For the love of a child (1992), her daughter Mahtob, the author of My Name is Mahtob (2013), and Moody, Mahmoody’s ex-husband and Mahtob’s father, the author of Lost without my Daughter (2013). The culture of a nation is expressed in the identity of its inhabitants, and literature and the art of dance contribute to its understanding.
Performance as Embodied Narratives in Young Italian Muslim Women
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2019
This paper presents a theoretical framework, which conceptualizes Muslims women everyday life with particular reference to the body and the intimate sphere. The paper has two main objectives. The first, more relevant, is to clarify the concept of performance, which is described as a narrative form that primarily calls into question the body and which appears as a mimetic rather than conceptual reflexivity (Lash, 1993). The second objective, of methodological nature, implies the presentation of a tool for analyzing the documental material collected during the research and its potential in interpreting the women narratives. Our general aim is to question the concept of representation of the experience and to understand how the actors “perform” their social experience.
The undercurrents of autobiographies can reveal more than just stories to their readers. The entanglement of authors and readers provokes the dialogic imagination and reproduces a text beyond the book. I ask how this entanglement can be addressed through notions of representation, subjectivity and embodiment. The article explores auto/biographies of two Iranian female refugees to trace the emergent process of their dialogic voices. Their voices are followed through their portrayal of body and home in transnational settings. I read their tales of desire and sorrow while departing from the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination to frame the narratives of embodiment and home in the mode of Deleuzian becoming.
Storyteller Theatre: Oral Literature Meets Performing Culture - A Middle Eastern Case
In the Islamic world where theatre has not developed as an independent art form, its orality has helped redress this imbalance by finding room for itself among the performing arts. Turkish meddah developed in accordance with the rules of nomadic life between the 11th and 19th centuries from the storyteller to one-man theatre. Absorbing the Central Asian shaman, singer of tales ozan (Tur.), Arabic maddah and the epic tradition of Persian Shahname, it has also gradually assimilated theatrical and dramatic elements. As an art form it combines orality with Turkish popular theatre. Books called ‘name’ (in Persian), like Battalname and Shahname, were spread orally and formed the basis of the repertoire of storytellers, as had been practised for centuries. This phenomenon reflects the complex interrelations between the ‘oral’ and ‘written’ culture models. As a new art form, storytelling, when viewed as a narrative performance, has developed its position in contemporary European off-theatre and has successfully proved itself in the arena of intercultural and interdisciplinary projects. In the context of being a part of Altaic and Middle Eastern oral traditions, the performing potential of storytelling art could be considered as a source of inspiration as it offers an example of a model of performance that provides equality between the performer and the audience. This chapter is the result of the personal experience of its author as a storyteller of Polish Storytellers Association ‘Grupa Studnia O’ (founded in 1997 in Poland, Warsaw), starting from academic research and on to the storytelling practice on the intercultural border between Occident and Orient. Key Words: Meddah theatre, storytelling, orality, epic, identification, formula, written and oral mind, performance, Islamic.