Hamid Dabashi

The first monograph to thoroughly document Shirin Neshat's video production, The Last Word provides both a beautiful reminder of her work's color and intensity and a crucial tool for her increasing number of fans and scholars. Neshat, who studied in the United States and has lived in New York for many years, found international success following the explosive release of her images of Muslim women wrapped in chadors with verses by rebel Persian poetesses traced on their faces, hands and feet. She became renowned when her short film Turbulent was awarded the Leone d'Oro at the 1999 Venice Biennale. With her camera persistently focused on the veiled women of the Muslim world, Neshat has continued to make striking and courageous work of rare beauty and intensity, and has presented it to continuing acclaim. She goes fearlessly into the widening gulf between conformism and revolt, submission and compliance, that characterizes the women of the Muslim world, seeking out images from the far sides of the divide that will both narrow the distance and help viewers sound its depths. The Last Word is a necessity for those who would approach, informed, the poetic works and the fierce commitment of an extraordinary artist.… (plus d'informations)

This was an almost aggressively terrible book, which I imagine in part must be due to the very short lead time between the events of the Green Revolution in Iran and the time of the book's publication. I picked up this book because I wanted to know more about Iranian history and the political tensions in the region—I'm shamefully ignorant. Yet I felt I learned little more about contemporary Iran than I'd already picked up from newspaper articles. Not only is there remarkably little in here about internal politics in Iran, Iran, The Green Movement and the USA reads like a partial first draft, poorly structured and only half thought through. The first few chapters are written like a newspaper op ed, but as the book progresses it becomes more a piece of academic theory, riddled with jargon which is italicised in random places for no good reason. If Dabashi did have anything worthwhile to say about the Revolution, I saw little of it here—due, in great part, to his impenetrable prose style. With sentences like

"which means nothing more than re-worlding the world with the world we have known and lived and experienced, before it was de-worlded by the false binary of 'the West and the Rest'"

Dabashi gives Judith Butler a run for her money in terms of incomprehensibility. (No, he never explains how one can de-world, or re-world, a world.)

Dabashi's methodology is also shoddy. He spends much of the book talking about Iran's ongoing encounter with 'modernity' is causing so much upheaval (which irritated me greatly, because he never defines what he means by 'modernity', a term which I almost always find problematic when used in historical writing), and then turns around in the last chapter to lambast scholars who do use the term. He's either being a hypocrite or he's not aware of what he himself has written. I tend towards believing he's just being sloppy and imprecise in language usage, hence also his use of 'medieval' as shorthand for uncivilised and brutal. This medievalist found that quite inaccurate and, coupled with his use of 'modernity', revealing about Dabashi's conception of historical progress.

What caused me to finally lose faith in learning anything of worth from the book, however, was reaching the section towards the end in which he denounces feminists—they are, it seems, just as bad as religious fundamentalists who oppress women, who torture, rape, and murder people because... well, Dabashi's not quite clear about that, but apparently because they're angry. (Women who are righteously angry: what bitches, amirite? Moral equivalence!) Feeling very uneasy about some of the language Dabashi was using to pillory a "clearly non-Muslim" Western feminist historian for apparently Orientalising and condescending to Iranian Muslimahs, I went hunting through the endnotes and tracked down the offending interview online. Now, I neither speak nor read Persian, so I can't speak to the accuracy of his characterisation of this scholar's words, but this "clearly non-Muslim" woman is evidently, and quite obviously, an Iranian expatriate. That seems like more than simple sloppiness; that's outright misstating the facts in order to suit your case, and an undergrad historian should be aware that that's wrong.

I'd still be interested in reading more about the history of Iran, but I won't be using any more of Dabashi's writing to do so. Alternative recommendations are welcome.… (plus d'informations)

I requested this book because I'm interested by Iran and wanted to learn more about its history and politics. Which I kind of did from this book, but it was a slog.

Dabashi's rejects the portrayal of Iranian history as a series of unconnected phases, instead linking the rise of the civil rights (Green) movement in 2009 with the protests that in 1906 led to the founding of an Iranian parliament. I would have liked to know much more about how the Green movement started and spread , who is involved and where it is now, but Dabashi assumes an amount of knowledge about this that I don't have.

Perhaps the target audience is 'Middle East watchers' and those who have a deeper knowledge of political theory and philosophy. Much of the book was lost on me as Dabashi discusses 'anarchic versus erotic bodies' (in reference to public, openly loving letters that women write to their jailed husbands) and 'presumed mimetic absolutism'.

In the end this felt like an unnecessarily extended essay in which what could have been interesting ended up being inaccessible to a casual reader.… (plus d'informations)