The Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies

Abstract

The Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS), the largest international gathering of scholars in the field, was held in Santa Monica, CA, on 27-30 May 2010. There were sixty-four panels, each with three to four presenters addressing topics ranging from literature, Shi`ism and Sufism, to modernity, politics, women and gender. Among the ones that I found most interesting were “Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran,” “Engagements with Reason: Shi`ism and Iran’s Intellectual Culture,” “Persian Literary and Cinematic Representations of a Society in Transition,” “Shi’i Modernity, Constitutionalism, Elections, and Factional Politics,” “Reconstructing the Forgotten Female: Women in the Realm of the Shahnama,” “Zones of Exploration: Society, Literature, and Film,” “Re-Reading Iranian Shi`ism: International and Transnational Connections and Influence,” “The Politics of the Possible in Iran,” “Women’s Issues in Modern Iran (in Persian),” “Discourses on Self And Other,” and “Sufism: Poetry and Practice.” Also featured were classical Persian music presentations and additional roundtable discussions. One telling example of often overlooked aspects of Iranian society was “‘Waking Up the Colours: Candour and Allegory in Women’s Rap Texts,” a paper on Iranian women’s rap music. Presenter Gai Bray, an ethnomusicologist, argued that unlike the common conception of rap as direct language, Iranian female rappers often use allegory to deal with difficult subject matters, such as rape and prostitution. In another memorable paper Babak Rahimi (University of California, San Diego) argued that Bushehr’s commemoration of Ashura serves to solidify communal identity. The ritual ends by burning the stage upon which the performances took place, signifying a communal act of creative destruction through which new identities are reconstructed via building new ritual sites ...