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ABSTRACT
The argument I put forth rests on an ostensibly simple and straightforward idea: the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran did not serve as an epistemic or epochal break in Iranian history. By viewing pre- and post-1979 Iran as mutually constitutive parts of a continuing history, and tracing the dynamic of the Islamic Republic of Iran's ongoing dialogue and engagement with Western representational practices, I show how Iran's current clerical leaders sought to reinterpret, appropriate, deflect and resist Eurocentric notions and constructions and, in doing so, also give them new meanings. The fact that Iran's representational strategies remain wedded to, and embedded in, Eurocentric discursive formations and subjectifications, I argue, is perhaps another testimony to the 1979 revolution's failure to live up to its decolonizing emancipatory vision. This predicament, no doubt, is common to many other postcolonial projects. However, the Iranian case is perhaps more intriguing, because the Islamic Republic of Iran is currently posited as the West's quintessential "other."
Introduction
Writing about colonial and independent India, Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown how the legacies of Eurocentrism have continued to haunt even their most passionate Indian detractors - indeed, how "even the very critique of colonialism itself... [is] unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlightenment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent" (Chakrabarty, 2000:4). To be sure, historians and social scientists dealing with "the postcolonial" should find this assertion to be common knowledge. After all, our world today, "the West" and the "non- West," is saturated with the legacies of Euro-America. Resulting from unequal power relations over the last five centuries, these legacies are to be seen everywhere - from global structures to daily economic practices, from state formations to household practices, from feminism to the centering in politics of race and ethnicity.1 It is precisely in relation to these circumstances that the renowned Indian sociologist and psychoanalyst, Ashis Nandy, much like Frantz Fanon in an earlier day, located these legacies in the psyches of "Europe's others" (Nandy, 2004; see also Dirlik, 2000:119-141).
However, it is fair to argue today that the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism in its various dimensions has been largely lost to an array of observers of post-1979 Iranian realities. In certain respects this oversight is understandable, particularly given die orientation and...