“Freedom isn't free”; an English expression that Kurds in Iran used it during Iranian revolution (1979) in a new context: a nation who wants freedom and democracy, must pay the price.This study describes what the Kurds as minority have done for freedom and democratization during the Iranian revolution; it analyses later what have the Iranian Kurds get paid. Kurdish question in Iran after the last revolution is the central question here. The purpose is to answer why the revolution as a political opportunity didn’t offer or provide the Kurds demands. The study explains why political situation in Iranian Kurdistan changed for the “worse” after revolution while they participated in the uprising with their hands and hoped for the “best”.A qualitative case study that proceeds Will Kymlicka's theory about minority rights and Robert Dahl's theory of democracy to examine the degree of both the Kurds' capacity to democratize their territory and to describe in-depth understanding of the ability of revolution and the new government to deal with Kurdish question democratically. / <p>2023-01-20</p>

From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, a corpus of didactic Persian texts circulated across Central and South Asian courts, functioning as a ‘mirror for princes’ or didactic manuals of ethical comportment. Numerous such manuscripts were embellished with meticulously detailed and laboriously created paintings. But what was the role of manuscript illustrations in shaping ethical and moral transformation? Though we now understand paintings through the frameworks of taxonomy and connoisseurship, how did illustrations make meaning to their intended audience, who read the text and were steeped in textual traditions? Contemporary sources are silent on the role of paintings in didactic texts, but, as my dissertation demonstrates, an in-depth evaluation of paintings and their accompanying text reveals how painted manuscripts engendered specific reading practices. These reading practices involved listening, visualizing mental images, viewing paintings, anticipating, recollecting, confusion and wonder, exercising patience, and even stilling our minds – experiences that made the reader-viewer dwell on the manuscript’s contents for an extended period. Focusing on painted manuscripts commissioned and collected by the Qutb Shahis in sixteenth-century Golconda, this dissertation’s chapters explore how writers, scribes, painters, and illuminators deployed allegory, repetition, and narrative plot, to attract and sustain their intended audience's attention.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1952 S22 / Master of Science

This dissertation analyzes the change in the representation of women in Iranian cinema since the 1990s and investigates the motives behind it by looking at the overall history of Iranian cinema and those active in its production. Iranian cinema, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, has been closely watched by the ruling powers and one way or another has been utilized to relay messages that comply with the dominant order. But this has not completely shut down all the efforts of the filmmakers striving to convey a more meaningful message. The Iranian cinema industry has been the arena of an elite intellectual group of people; only following the 1979 Revolution and the “legitimization of cinema” by the Islamic order did it become a widely accessible industry to the general public, who tended to ignore or oppose it prior to the Islamic Revolution. This thesis pays close attention to the changing roles of women in film production and representation. Although aspects of women’s lives become stricter after the Revolution, it is in this period—from the late 1980s into the 1990s—that women for the first time took a prominent role both behind and in front of the camera. This dissertation argues that such shifts are due to “factionalism” within the Islamic Republic, shifts internal to the film industry and the emergence of a group of highly educated film production teams, in addition to the variety of ways in which women were able to exercise more agency in the film industry. One trope around which this shift occurs is that of the “veil” as a technique and metaphor for social practice in representation. Employing feminist film theory tools, a number of representative female-centric films from this period are analyzed, focusing on their cultural, political, and cinematic contexts. Examining the films with respect to the representation of women, the research relies on textual analysis as its basic methodology. Along with the textual analysis, interviews conducted with filmmakers and people active in the industry also help to map the films in the socio-political context in which they were produced.

In this thesis, I aim to investigate the variation of Persian pronominal address system and politeness strategies in contemporary Iranian society from a quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic perspective. I focus on Persian speakers’ use and perception of pronominal address forms in the light of socio-cultural norms in contemporary Iran. Persian, has two personal pronouns for singular address, to ([to]) the familiar or intimate ‘you’ and šoma ([∫oma:]) the deferential or formal ‘you’ (historically the second person plural but now also used as second person singular). Moreover, Persian is a pro-drop language, so the interaction between address pronouns and agreement marking on the verb must be taken into account. Another significant feature of colloquial Persian is a hybrid usage of the overt deferential second person pronoun and informal agreement forming a mismatch construction (i.e. šoma with 2s verb agreement) and intra-speaker pronominal address switches that occur between the deferential and casual pronominal address forms. Those deviations from the prescribed forms and/or distribution of the address pronouns are very interesting aspects that may show different levels of politeness even in one utterance. Consequently, this research examines spontaneous data looking at the sociolinguistic distributions and the pragmatic functions of pronominal address forms in contemporary Persian language and politeness synchronically. Three types of spontaneous data were collected for the purpose of analysis: a) participant observation, b) natural media conversations and c) sociolinguistic interviews with Persian speakers. In this study, the quantitative analysis investigates the correlation of pronominal address forms with extralinguistic factors such as age and gender of speaker and addressee in the interactional data. The qualitative analysis sheds light on how pronominal address forms and their variation encode communicative strategies in face-to-face interactions. Based on triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results with sociolinguistic interviews, I propose a dynamic model of indexicality for Persian pronominal address forms, which accommodates different forms and functions of address pronouns in interactional stances.

Demographic and Socioeconomic factors related to the urbanization of Iran are discussed. An historical review of the growth of urbanization in Iran is reported. Factors included in the analysis are the birth, death, literacy, and mobility rates as well as the age-sex structure of the population. The data are from the national censuses of 1956 and 1966. Changes in demographic trends in both major and smaller cities during this decade are discussed in detail. The results of the analyses of these data are applicable to most developing countries. This information may be of possible aid in planning for the growth and redistribution of the Iranian population.

The advent of Area Studies and Comparative Literature in US academia developed in response to (or, more aptly, as a result of) the Cold War in the 1960s, with locations such as the Middle East relegated to Area Studies due to the strategic importance that knowledge of its histories, cultures, and languages had for global (read: US) geopolitics. On the other hand, the discipline of Comparative Literature constituted the expansion of US literary studies due to the influx of European intellectual refugees, with scholars and practitioners formulating the field around texts in, primarily, German and Romance languages in conversation with Anglophone texts. Over the past two decades, this Eurocentric model of Comparative Literature has been challenged, and, to some extent, subverted. Yet more often than not, modern Persian Literature is consigned to the realm of Area Studies in general and a Middle Eastern discourse in particular. My dissertation, “Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s,” addresses this gap by placing Iran and Persian literature front and center of a comparative project that includes canonical writers from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean. Additionally, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” considers intellectual figures and their literary productions that contributed to the liberation of individual and social consciousness. These figures created unique forms and languages of revolt that deviated from the prevailing definitions of committed, political, or national literature. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad sets a precedent for comparing Iran and the Caribbean in his chapter titled “Tehran,” by connecting Gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis)—the cultural and socio-political manifesto of Jalal Al-e Ahmad—and Aimé Césaire’s négritude. On a broader, geopolitical level, he concomitantly connects imperial schemes in the “nominally independent” Iran and Caribbean region, along with the forms of resistance to them. Yet, for a chapter titled “Tehran,” the focus is mostly the contribution of other Third World projects to that of Iran’s. Conversely, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” centers Iran as a comparable case meriting comprehensive analysis in Third World cultural and political projects. Furthermore, rather than study the works of Al-e Ahmad and Césaire as exemplary cultural projects of resistance, I choose to investigate alternative modes of political thought and writing that move beyond the framework of “resistance”—modes that are not always considered as contributing to the political landscape. The “disorderly” politics and the “disorderly” creations of the writers under study thus take to task the idea of political literature during the decades of global decolonization, motivated by Jean Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée (engaged literature). In three chapters, I study Iranian literature of the mid to late 1960s in comparison to African diasporic literature from the Caribbean of the late 1970s to mid 1980s. The oft-overlooked issue of gender in national liberation projects of the time is addressed in my first chapter, “Scarecrows and Whores: Women in Savashoun and Hérémakhonon,” as I compare the two novels by Simin Daneshvar and Maryse Condé. The multilingual female protagonists in the novels of Condé and Daneshvar act as both literal and cultural interpreters and intermediaries in the narratives. I then extend my analysis of these protagonists’ precarious positions to the equally precarious intellectual positions of their creators in political discourses. By using Condé’s delineation of disorder in “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer” as a necessary marker for freedom in both thought and creativity, central arguments of my dissertation about disorderly political imaginations are also presented. In “Disrupted and Disruptive Genealogies in the Novels of Hushang Golshiri and Édouard Glissant,” I compare Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) and Éduoard Glissant’s La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin). Building upon Michél Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges,” I demonstrate how their protagonists’ insistence on finding answers to the political questions of the present in the historical past (of empire and slavery respectively) leads to their insanity, and how, concomitantly, the formal characteristics of these narratives (such as their in-betweenness in terms of genre, language, and mode of address) offer “noncoercive knowledge” (to use Edward Said’s phrasing from The World, the Text, and the Critic) in lieu of answers. While taking into consideration the world literary traditions these novelists are engaging with, my analysis moves beyond a poststructuralist critique; instead, I privilege these writers’ own historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in literary analysis, both distinctively and in comparison with one another. In “Poet-Travelers: The Poetic Geographies of Sohrab Sepehri and Derek Walcott,” I analyze how they both create a poetic language of revolt and liberation that, while affirming multiple literary and linguistic traditions, cannot be dismissed as derivative or unoriginal. In this comparative reading, I study their particular use of enjambments and anaphora, the combination of an autobiographical, monologic poetic voice with that of dramatic dialogues, a plethora of travel imagery and vocabulary that reflect the poets’ own multitudinous travels, the disparate religious, mythic, and folkloric traditions they draw from, and ultimately, the unique languages they create. In comparing these texts, I consider the different and particular historical moments they were written in, which is a revolutionary moment for Iran, and for the Caribbean texts is a postcolonial moment. The political nuances of these different contexts thus effect the timbre of the texts, and these divergences in articulation are analyzed as well. “Disorderly Political Imaginations” thus does not create a homogenizing, globalized study of literary texts. In that same vein, my research demonstrates the valence that incorporating neglected subjects (in this case, Persian language and literary studies) into Comparative Literature can have in understanding the hegemonic structures of power at play in knowledge production, both locally and globally.

Dans l’espace des savoirs sur l’Iran, les énoncés concernant sa dimension religieuse ne sont pas rares. Au contraire, cet espace déborde de travaux qui ont, soit la religion pour objet principal d’analyse, soit une place primordiale pour la religion en en faisant le facteur par excellence de la compréhension de la société, de la culture et de la politique iraniennes. Reconnu en tant qu’une tradition spirituelle, ésotérique et mystique de l’islam dans la période de l’institutionnalisation des études iraniennes, en France, le chiisme fait objet de controverses intellectuelles après sa mise en action par les révolutionnaires de 1978-1979 et l’instauration de la République islamique d’Iran. Dépassant les cadres interprétatifs sclérosés de la connaissance du chiisme par les philosophes, les spécialistes des sciences religieuses et ceux de la civilisation iranienne, ce sont désormais les praticiens en sciences sociales qui prennent le relais pour la formation des discours scientifiques à ce sujet. Cette bifurcation d’objet, liée autant aux faits qu’aux orientations épistémiques, didactiques et idéologiques, va de pair avec l’agir de la conjoncture sociopolitique sur les conditions de possibilité du savoir pour que la problématisation de la question du chiisme constitue un éventail difficile et imprévisible. En partant d’une approche constructiviste, cette thèse entend donner à voir les composants scientifiques mais aussi extrascientifiques qui orientent la problématisation du chiisme dans l’espace des savoirs sur l’Iran en France de 1947 à 2010. / Since the establishment of renewed Iranian Studies in Post-War period, the academic study of Iran has been growing abundantly in France. In this scientific space of knowledge, the question of “shi’isme” has been evoked prominently through philosophical and spiritual patterns since it became more controversial after the revolution of 1979 and the revival of “shi’isme” as an ideological mean of defying the imperial regime. This led to an epistemological and institutional rupture related to different theoretical and methodological patterns within disciplines and thought systems associated with the construction of “shi’isme” as an object of scientific enquiries. The rise of intellectual controversies between spiritual and historicized frameworks that oriented the production of discourses on “shi’isme” challenges the scientific and epistemological patterns of knowledge construction, as well as ideological and socio-political ones. This study attempts to provide a constructivist approach to the advent and the evolution of scientific discourses on “shi’isme” in France from 1947 to 2010, through a socio-historical viewpoint of the sociology of knowledge. Institutional patterns, epistemological criteria and sociological components will be put together to illustrate a comprehensive mapping of discourse structuration on “shi’isme” in the French space of knowledge on Iran.

The New Wave (Moj-e Now), as the rather large body of “quality films” made in Iran before the 1979 revolution came to be known, forms the main thematic concern of this study. From start to end, however, this primary track of investigation is opened up to other mediums of cultural production: modernist Persian fiction and poetry, the visual arts scene, the discourse on ethnography and “folklore studies,” and the critical texts produced by public intellectuals. The second main theme coming to the fore is the intersection of the emergent “discourse of authenticity,” the Iranian intellectuals’ growing demand for “cultural rootedness,” and the production of modernist aesthetics in literature, arts, and cinema. Introduced early in the text, the idea of “modernism of uneven development” provides the theoretical frame for this project; the recurrences of the hypothesis, particularly as it pertains to a temporal divide between the city and the countryside, are discerned and analysed. The Iranian New Wave Cinema, I contend, always showed an ethnographic register, as it too was after worlds and times deemed as vanishing. This “movement” in cinematic modernism first emerged from within the documentary mode, which began to flourish in Iran from the 1960s. Cutting right across this study, the perceived divide between the urban and the rural finds its reflection even in the way that some of its chapters are organized. Hence, the allegory of the city, and that of the country. But, where ends the national allegory, a matter still conditional on imagined continuity, other forms of allegory come to the surface. Critical reading in this sense becomes an act of reproduction, further opening up fissures and discontinuities of what is already deemed as petrified, whether of the national or of realism. Retaining a faith in the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality though, certain manifestations of materiality come to the fore through my close readings of films from the New Wave. A number of these material formations come to focus as the “objects” of the study: the museum display, the ruin, the body, the mud brick wall, the moving car, and the old neighborhood passageway.

In the modern world, electronic communications play a significant role in national and international electronic transactions. This issue has forced all legal systems to face up to many emerging legal problems in the context of electronic communications, such as the time and the place of formation of electronic contracts, the validation of e-contracts made by the interaction with e-agents, the legal validity of electronic documents and signatures, consumer protection in contracting electronically in particular in cross-border e-transactions, and the Internet jurisdiction and choice of law. One issue to determine is the place of formation of contracts when contracting electronically, either through email, websites or chat-rooms to see how the notion of 'place' is perceivable in cyberspace; and the way of application of the four traditional theories of information, dispatch, receipt and awareness relating to the time and place of conclusion of contracts in contracting by electronic means should be examined. Regarding the legal validity of e-contracts made through interactive websites, the legal status of electronic agents which play an important role in this process is questionable to see whether they are akin to real agents in the physical world or they are only a mere tool of communication. The responsible person for any mistakes that an electronic agent makes and causes losses or damages to the contracting parties should also be examined. There are also questions regarding meeting the formalities in the formation of some specific contracts in contracting electronically to see whether the electronic documents and signatures legally valid and admissible at the courts of law or not. Their legal weight should also be measured. Moving on the jurisdiction and choice of law issue, some argumentative questions raise. For instance, where the rule of private international law provides that the competent court is the court within which jurisdiction the contract is performed, it is necessary to see that where the place of performance of the contract in which the subject matter is digital goods such as e-books or computer software delivered online is. This is also an important question in providing electronic services such as e-teaching. Regarding the choice of law issue the same questions of jurisdiction are posed. Furthermore, as consumer protection issue in B2C contracts is important in developing electronic commerce worldwide, it should be considered that whether the consumer party is able to bring an action against the business party in his own place of domicile or habitual residence or not. These are only a sample of questions that the current research tries to analyse based on the traditional legal rules and principles and the statues on electronic commerce. Discussing the above legal doubts in the context of Iranian law shows that there are a number of legal uncertainties in the Iranian legal system hindering, or at least putting in doubt, the development of electronic commerce in both national and cross-border electronic transactions. Despite the fact that some of them have been addressed by the Iranian Electronic Commerce Act 2004 indirectly, however a detailed legal work is still definitely needed to elaborate the questions and provide solutions developing and modernizing Iranian law in the context of electronic contracts. The author in the current research tries to analyse the questions by a horizontal comparative study of the UNCITRAL Model Laws, the Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts 2005, the EU law, English law, American law and Iranian law. Also, a four-stage roadmap that acts as the guiding principle of this research is employed to develop the Iranian legal system in the context of e-commerce. The first stage focuses on whether the exact application of Iranian traditional law can address the emerging legal doubts; the second stage expands and develops traditional rules; the third introduces legal presumptions; and the fourth theorizes new rules. The research concludes that the Iranian legal system may be modernized and developed in the context of electronic contracts by adopting the legal policy and solutions of other legal systems by both scholarly legal doctrines and legislation.