What do you think?
Rate this book
Iran Without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation
A history of the cosmopolitan forces that made contemporary Iran
“No ruling regime,” writes Hamid Dabashi, “could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people.” For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in which the traditional ruling Islamist regime is counterposed to a modern population of educated, secular urbanites. However, Iran has for many centuries been a nation forged from a diverse mix of influences, most of them non-sectarian and cosmopolitan.
In Iran Without Borders , the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homeland—either physically or emotionally—and imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious.
“No ruling regime,” writes Hamid Dabashi, “could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people.” For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in which the traditional ruling Islamist regime is counterposed to a modern population of educated, secular urbanites. However, Iran has for many centuries been a nation forged from a diverse mix of influences, most of them non-sectarian and cosmopolitan.
In Iran Without Borders , the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homeland—either physically or emotionally—and imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 5, 2016
15 people are currently reading
281 people want to read
About the author
Hamid Dabashi
75 books199 followersBorn on 15 June 1951 into a working class family in the south-western city of Ahvaz in the Khuzestan province of Iran, Hamid Dabashi received his early education in his hometown and his college education in Tehran, before he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.
He has written 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.
In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.
A committed teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist. He has two grown-up children, Kaveh and Pardis, who are both Columbia University graduates, and he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi, their daughter Chelgis and their son Golchin.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.
He has written 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.
In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.
A committed teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist. He has two grown-up children, Kaveh and Pardis, who are both Columbia University graduates, and he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi, their daughter Chelgis and their son Golchin.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 7, 2017
من کلا حمید داباشی رو تازه کشف کردم. کتاب ها و مقاله هاش فوق العاده ان. نه فقط به عنوان مطالب علمی و پژوهشی که بعضا به عنوان رمان و مطالب ادبی هم میشه بهشون نگاه کرد. من تو این مدت مقاله ها و کتاب های زیادی ازش خوندم و با اینکه سال هاست ایران نیست اما نگاهش به مسائل ابدا ایران پرت و دور از ذهن نیست. انگار تو تهران زندگی میکنه و از نزدیک شاهد همه چیز هست. زوایای دیدش به مسائل مربوط به ایران خیلی خلاقانه است و دور از ذهن و خیلی خوب هم شما رو با خودش همراه میکنه. اینجوری نیست که وسطش بگی چقدر طرف خبرنداره از فضای فعلی ایران ( مثل خیلی از نویسنده های خارج نشین) این کتاب رو البته من کامل نخوندم اما پیرامون موضوع جذاب نژاد در ایران هست. تلاش کرده با مستندات نشون بده که ایران دارای نژاد هایی از سراسر جهان هست، و تلاش داشته که در طول تاریخ معاصر این مساله رو مخفی کنه و داعیه ی استقلال طلبی و استرس از نفوذ بیگانه که بحثِ همیشگی ایرانی هاس هست عملا خیلی موضوعیتی نداره. برای مقال در جنوب ایران نژاد های هندی و آفریقایی در برابر نژاد فارس و عرب نادیده گرفته شدن در حالی که به لحاظ جمعیتی کمتر نیستن. توضیح داده که یکی از دلایلش مثلا این بوده که این دو نژاده مستعمره های اروپایی بودن و برای ایران خوب نبوده که باهاشون پیوندی داشته باشه. طرح بحث جالبی بود و من در دو سه فصل اول و آخر باز خیلی چیزهایی که میگفت برام جدید بود و به نگاهم درباره ی ایران وسعت داد.
August 12, 2016
thanks to netgalley and the publishers for a free copy in return for an open and honest review.
very detailed book looking at the postcolonial Iran starting off through its history through the several monarchies and the events leading upto the 1979 uprising and conflicts within since as the author looks at cultural tensions between secular and islamic clericalism
very detailed book looking at the postcolonial Iran starting off through its history through the several monarchies and the events leading upto the 1979 uprising and conflicts within since as the author looks at cultural tensions between secular and islamic clericalism
October 18, 2019
While we may interpret Anderson's Imagined Communities differently this is an excellent and important book when envisioning cosmopolitan futures
January 15, 2017
Full disclosure: I am obsessed with all things Iran so I 'naturally' enjoyed this book (published in 2016).
I am not sure I have fully grasped the underlying theoretical framework of the nation state and the postcolonial (eg Iran) in particular but the core argument, I suppose, is that the formation of this nation state was predicated on a transnational public sphere that linked its imperial past to its postcolonial present.
This transnational site of the nation and nationalism softens and dissolves the postcolonial frontier fictions it implicates into the larger domain of the geopolitics of liberation that is located decidedly outside the colonial boundaries of the nation.
The author uses the lens of poetry, travelogues, drama, cinema and other art forms to reconstruct the transnational sphere, eg, Iranian magazines published in Berlin, Cairo, Delhi and Istanbul, in which the discourse of the nation state (Iran) in making was shaped, influenced by the European and Russian revolutions, India's colonial experience etc:
"Iran was imagined in Calcutta, Berlin, Paris, and Cairo far more vividly and passionately than it was in Tehran, Isfahan, or Qom" (In other words, also, the postcolonial nation state was imagined from the outside.)
Anderson's theory of nations as imagined community is Eurocentric as it builds on the (European) experience of Enlightenment and Revolution. This concept bypasses the specific (cosmopolitan, transnational etc) historical experience of the postcolonial nation states that emerged from the three Muslim Empires (Mughals, Salafvids and Ottomans, ie, nowadays' Turkey, India, Iran, Egypt etc).
In order to liberate 'ourselves' from this colonial epistemological trap we must de-fetishize these fictive frontiers (expose their ideological origins) and see them for the porous lines and invitations to transgress they are. Crucially, not in the apolitical postmodernism of diaspora studies and Homi Bhabha 'in-betweenness' etc which again fail to understand the already transnational disposition of these postcolonial states.
We must acknowledge the postnational politics of the region where the nation state has become the limit of domestic tyranny, where ruling regimes in Iran and elsewhere can murder their citizens with impunity and whose alternative is military intervention in the name of human rights.
Postnational politics as a liberating force for transnational (including class) solidarity rather than bourgeois ethnic nationalism (that's kind of a universal argument). Thinking outside the fictive borders towards a geography that liberates the nation from its fixed cartography of domination by domestic tyranny fearing (and feeding on the fear of) foreign domination.
I suppose Dabashi's analysis of how the 1979 popular revolution degenerated into a nativist, sectarian and thus 'Islamic Revolution' is analogous to how the Arab Spring revolutions denegeratrd through similar dynamics. He reads the Green Movement (and subsequent Arab Spring) as a social uprising 'retrieving the nation's repressed and denied cosmopolitan political culture'. Likewise, he reads today's counter-revolutionary forces', eg Iran, US and respective allies, as attempts to (again) suppress the progressive and cosmopolitan character of the revolutions and to (successfully, I guess) degenerate the uprisings along sectarian and fundamentalist lines.
Finally, and tying in with his essay 'can non-europeans think', Dabashi outlines a new knowledge regime / sites for new knowledge production that can make sense of a world beyond postcoloniality and mobilize 'our untapped forces that lie behind the sterile binaries of secular-religious, Arab-Iranian, Sunni- Shi'i and 'the West and the Rest'.
I am not sure I have fully grasped the underlying theoretical framework of the nation state and the postcolonial (eg Iran) in particular but the core argument, I suppose, is that the formation of this nation state was predicated on a transnational public sphere that linked its imperial past to its postcolonial present.
This transnational site of the nation and nationalism softens and dissolves the postcolonial frontier fictions it implicates into the larger domain of the geopolitics of liberation that is located decidedly outside the colonial boundaries of the nation.
The author uses the lens of poetry, travelogues, drama, cinema and other art forms to reconstruct the transnational sphere, eg, Iranian magazines published in Berlin, Cairo, Delhi and Istanbul, in which the discourse of the nation state (Iran) in making was shaped, influenced by the European and Russian revolutions, India's colonial experience etc:
"Iran was imagined in Calcutta, Berlin, Paris, and Cairo far more vividly and passionately than it was in Tehran, Isfahan, or Qom" (In other words, also, the postcolonial nation state was imagined from the outside.)
Anderson's theory of nations as imagined community is Eurocentric as it builds on the (European) experience of Enlightenment and Revolution. This concept bypasses the specific (cosmopolitan, transnational etc) historical experience of the postcolonial nation states that emerged from the three Muslim Empires (Mughals, Salafvids and Ottomans, ie, nowadays' Turkey, India, Iran, Egypt etc).
In order to liberate 'ourselves' from this colonial epistemological trap we must de-fetishize these fictive frontiers (expose their ideological origins) and see them for the porous lines and invitations to transgress they are. Crucially, not in the apolitical postmodernism of diaspora studies and Homi Bhabha 'in-betweenness' etc which again fail to understand the already transnational disposition of these postcolonial states.
We must acknowledge the postnational politics of the region where the nation state has become the limit of domestic tyranny, where ruling regimes in Iran and elsewhere can murder their citizens with impunity and whose alternative is military intervention in the name of human rights.
Postnational politics as a liberating force for transnational (including class) solidarity rather than bourgeois ethnic nationalism (that's kind of a universal argument). Thinking outside the fictive borders towards a geography that liberates the nation from its fixed cartography of domination by domestic tyranny fearing (and feeding on the fear of) foreign domination.
I suppose Dabashi's analysis of how the 1979 popular revolution degenerated into a nativist, sectarian and thus 'Islamic Revolution' is analogous to how the Arab Spring revolutions denegeratrd through similar dynamics. He reads the Green Movement (and subsequent Arab Spring) as a social uprising 'retrieving the nation's repressed and denied cosmopolitan political culture'. Likewise, he reads today's counter-revolutionary forces', eg Iran, US and respective allies, as attempts to (again) suppress the progressive and cosmopolitan character of the revolutions and to (successfully, I guess) degenerate the uprisings along sectarian and fundamentalist lines.
Finally, and tying in with his essay 'can non-europeans think', Dabashi outlines a new knowledge regime / sites for new knowledge production that can make sense of a world beyond postcoloniality and mobilize 'our untapped forces that lie behind the sterile binaries of secular-religious, Arab-Iranian, Sunni- Shi'i and 'the West and the Rest'.
August 30, 2017
There's an excellent point here - that Iran's truest and most legitimate culture is deeply cosmopolitan, which rather undercuts the silly caricatures usually presented inside and outside the country - but while this is nicely discussed in places, the writing too often degenerates into the ugliest sort of elitist academy-speak ("colonial nation-states... were formed using the ideological predicate of a prefabricated national alterity", anyone?) and the author has spent far too much time on Trump-like boasts of how much better he is than anyone else (how "potent" are his "strategies"), rather than writing something that might actually be accessible to the wide audience he laughably claims to be targeting.
February 19, 2021
Yes he is old, rusty and a bit out of steam by now but.. we love him. If you are not very informed about the historic arc of Iran in terms of "cosmopolitan" culture and geopolitical frictions since the Qajar period (and a little earlier) then it is definitely an eye opener and can't possibly hurt.
May 10, 2025
ترجمة سيئة جدا وكارثية لكتاب تافه، حسافه على ال٦ دنانير الي شريت فيهم النسخة العربية، وال٣٠ دولار تكلفة النسخة الانجليزية، ضيعتهم على تفاهه وانحطاط وخرابيط يسارية ما قد تصورت اني الاقيهم مجتمعين بكتاب واحد.
July 9, 2020
A great, insightful book particularly for those who are interested in Iran and the wider Middle East region.
July 31, 2025
نظرة وقراءة لايران كأمة وكدولة بعد الفترة الاستعمارية وتأثيرها الى اليوم
September 16, 2016
Starting from the idea that: 'no ruling regime could ever make an exclusive claim over the idea of 'Iran' as a nation, a people, a public sphere, a cultural efferverscence still awaiting its political fulfillment', the author aims at offering a post-colonial perspective on the nation. Relying on Iran's cosmopolitan political culture it explains the genesis of various cultural and political ideas and intellectual histories. Although the departure point and the perspectives as such are challenging, but apply as well to other national processes taking place in the region and beyond, and the histories are full of interesting details - particularly the Iranian cinema, a domain the author has a vast expertise to approach - it treats the post post-colonial identity as a given, which is extremely unclear if we consider the current state-of-the arts in Iran. The political and cultural dissents and the clash of mentalities have to offer in the future many interesting challenging and evolutions that might very well dramatically change any 'post-post etc' narrative.
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange of an honest review
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange of an honest review
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews