Gender and Dance in Modern Iran

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran PDF Author: Ida Meftahi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317620615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage investigates the ways dancing bodies have been providing evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanism, and religiosity across the twentieth century. Focusing on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and spectatorial cultural ideology, this book traces the dancing body in multiple milieus of performance, including the Pahlavi era’s national artistic scene and the popular café and cabaret stages, as well as the commercial cinematic screen and the post-revolutionary Islamized theatrical stage. It links the socio-political discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, in order to interrogate the formation of dominant categories of "modern," "high," and "artistic," and the subsequent "othering" of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the "national" stage. Through the study of archival and ethnographic research as well as a diverse literature pertaining to music, theater, cinema, and popular culture, it combines a close reading of primary sources such as official documents, press materials, and program notes with visual analysis of filmic materials and imageries, as well as interviews with practitioners. It offers an original and informed exploration into the ways performing bodies and their public have been associated with binary notions of vice and virtue, morality and immorality, commitment and degeneration, chastity and eroticism, and veiled-ness and nakedness. Engaging with a range of methodological and historiographical methods, including postcolonial, performance, and feminist studies, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle East history and Iranian studies, as well as gender studies and dance and performance studies.

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran PDF Author: Ida Meftahi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317620615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage investigates the ways dancing bodies have been providing evidence for competing representations of modernity, urbanism, and religiosity across the twentieth century. Focusing on the transformation of the staged dancing body, its space of performance, and spectatorial cultural ideology, this book traces the dancing body in multiple milieus of performance, including the Pahlavi era’s national artistic scene and the popular café and cabaret stages, as well as the commercial cinematic screen and the post-revolutionary Islamized theatrical stage. It links the socio-political discourses on performance with the staged public dancer, in order to interrogate the formation of dominant categories of "modern," "high," and "artistic," and the subsequent "othering" of cultural realms that were discursively peripheralized from the "national" stage. Through the study of archival and ethnographic research as well as a diverse literature pertaining to music, theater, cinema, and popular culture, it combines a close reading of primary sources such as official documents, press materials, and program notes with visual analysis of filmic materials and imageries, as well as interviews with practitioners. It offers an original and informed exploration into the ways performing bodies and their public have been associated with binary notions of vice and virtue, morality and immorality, commitment and degeneration, chastity and eroticism, and veiled-ness and nakedness. Engaging with a range of methodological and historiographical methods, including postcolonial, performance, and feminist studies, this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle East history and Iranian studies, as well as gender studies and dance and performance studies.

Homogenization, Gender and Everyday Life in Pre- and Trans-modern Iran

Homogenization, Gender and Everyday Life in Pre- and Trans-modern Iran PDF Author: Leila Papoli-Yazdi
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
ISBN: 3830993501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Homogenization, Gender and Everyday Life in Pre- and Trans-modern Iran: An Archaeological Reading is actually an effort to investigate the interaction of power structure and gender in the context of everyday life in Iran in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book pursues two main goals: situating gender in Iranian archaeology and calling for more consideration to daily life in archaeological gender researches. Drawing on a wide range of material culture, textual evidence, statistics and oral accounts, all chapters render the destruction of the everyday life of ordinary people. Events like parties and ceremonies, marriage and kinship, sexual practices, dress codes and even eating and drinking were gently regulated by the surveillance state. Accordingly, the term homogenization in the book's title refers to the policies of the Pahlavi government, the first Iranian modern centralized state. In this way, the book seeks to understand the process of gender and sexual transformation of Iranian society, the process which resulted in the production of deviants and negative gender and sexual lives. Being the first archaeological research on gender by native archaeologists, the authors state the fact that this book investigates the politics of gender while many other aspects of gender remain still uninvestigated. Leila Papoli-Yazdi, Researcher, Department of Historical Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran PDF Author: Janet Afary
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521898463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
This book charts the history of Iran's sexual revolution from the nineteenth century to today. The resilience of the Iranian people forms the basis of this sexual revolution, one that is promoting reforms in marriage and family laws, and demanding more egalitarian gender and sexual relations.

The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale

The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale PDF Author: Nesta Ramazani
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815607274
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This is an extraordinary autobiography of a young girl growing up in Iran. The daughter of an English Christian mother and an Iranian Zoroastrian father, Nesta Ramazani sketches her personal life story against the backdrop of a society marked by the fusion of Iranian, Islamic, and Western cultures, and by the efforts of an authoritarian state to force modernization on a traditional society. Within this multicultural tapestry of personal, cultural, and national life, the author portrays how she came to love Persian and Western music, poetry, and dance. But translating this love into practice seemed an insurmountable task until an American woman pioneered the establishment of the first indigenous Iranian ballet company. As a member of this troupe, the author violated convention, performing first in her native land and then traveling abroad to exhibit this beautiful synthesis of Persian/Western forms to foreign audiences. The significance of this work transcends an autobiography penned by an Iranian woman—still a taboo in traditional Iranian society—it is a unique microcosm of today’s universal quest for a dialogue among civilizations. Ramazani’s story will appeal not only to students of Iran, the Middle East, and women’s studies, but also to general readers.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity PDF Author: Anthony Shay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190493933
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and at a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, as when African Americans were - and sometimes still are - told that their bodies are 'not right' for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when 19th century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. More recently, dance performances became a locus of ethnic disunity in the former Yugoslavia as the Serbs of Bosnia attended dance concerts but only applauded for the Serbian dances, presaging the violent disintegration of that failed state. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. Newly-commissioned for the volume, the chapters of the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity. Dance and ethnicity is an increasingly active area of scholarly inquiry in dance studies and ethnomusicology alike and the need is great for serious scholarship to shape the contours of these debates. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research from leading experts which will set the tone for future scholarly conversation.

Dancing in the Blood

Dancing in the Blood PDF Author: Edward Ross Dickinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107196221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
The book explores the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European culture in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis and reveals the connections between dance, politics, culture, religion, the arts, psychology, entertainment, and selfhood.

Gender in Contemporary Iran

Gender in Contemporary Iran PDF Author: Roksana Bahramitash
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 113682426X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book examines gender and the transformation of contemporary Iran.€In particular it documents the changes in women's lives, challenging the idea that the revolution put back the clock for women and showing€how they have now become agents of social change rather than victims.

Dance Cultures Around the World

Dance Cultures Around the World PDF Author: Lynn Frederiksen
Publisher: Human Kinetics
ISBN: 1492572322
Category : Dance
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
"Textbook for undergrad general education and dance courses on the topic of dance around the world. It serves as a gateway into studying world cultures through dance"--

Glocal Bodies

Glocal Bodies PDF Author: Elaheh Hatami
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839460808
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book is a critical study of Iranian dance and the works of Iranian-American female dancers in exile. Focusing on the study of contemporary Iranian dance through analysis of the choreographies of three female dancers in diaspora (namely Aisan Hoss, Shahrzad Khorsandi, and Banafsheh Sayyad), this research is among the first of its kind. Elaheh Hatami investigates the transformation of professional Iranian dance and discusses the role of relocation and displacement in its performance. She argues that Iranian dance and Iranian female dancers have always been in exile - not only in a physical sense, but also in the metaphorical sense of ›exile‹ implying foreignness, exclusion, and marginalization.

Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution

Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution PDF Author: Pedram Partovi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315385619
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Critics and academics have generally dismissed the commercial productions of the late Pahlavi era, best known for their songs and melodramatic plots, as shallow, derivative ‘entertainment’. Instead, they have concentrated on the more recent internationally acclaimed art films, claiming that these constitute Iranian ‘national' cinema, despite few Iranians having seen them. Film discourse, and even fan talk, have long attempted to marginalize the mainstream releases of the 1960s and 1970s with the moniker filmfarsi, ironically asserting that such popular favorites were culturally inauthentic. This book challenges the idea that filmfarsi is detached from the past and present of Iranians. Far from being escapist Hollywood fare merely translated into Persian, it claims that the better films of this supposed genre must be taken as both a subject of, and source for, modern Iranian history. It argues that they have an appeal that relies on their ability to rearticulate traditional courtly and religious ideas and forms to problematize in unexpectedly complex and sophisticated ways the modernist agenda that secular nationalist elites wished to impose on their viewers. Taken seriously, these films raise questions about standard treatments of Iran's modern history. By writing popular films into Iranian history, this book advocates both a fresh approach to the study of Iranian cinema, as well as a rethinking of the modernity/tradition binary that has organized the historiography of the recent past. It will appeal to those interested in Iranian cinema, Iranian history and culture, and, more broadly, readers dissatisfied with a dichotomous approach to modernity.