Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Setrag Manoukian , City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History and Poetry , Iranian Studies (New York : Routledge , 2012). Pp. 271. $135.00 cloth, $44.95 paper.
Social and Cultural History
It will come as no surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with the field of Iranian studies that literature on modern Iran has tended to focus analytically on questions of state and nation, and geographically on the capital Tehran, with the latter standing in for either the state or the nation, or an amalgamation of both. Some of this has to do with the centrality of Tehran in contemporary Iranian history and politics, some with the complex subjective positioning of the scholars themselves, some with source access, and some with sheer inertia. But recently, things seem to be changing: there has been, if not an explosion, then certainly a palpable increase in the number of scholarly works that attempt to go beyond Tehran and political history to illuminate our understanding of modern Iran from a variety of other perspectives. Setrag Manoukian's City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History, and Poetry, is one such welcome work of scholarship.
Manoukian describes his project as a "genealogical ethnography of history and poetry in contemporary Iran" (p. 1), one that takes a "provincial viewpoint," that of Shiraz, to "show how the field of 'culture' (farhang) came to occupy an equally if not more significant place in the process of subject formation" (p. 4). On the surface, this seems like an...