Iran and Postcolonial Studies: Its Development and Current Status

Abstract

Even though Iran has never been formally colonized, a brief glance at its history reveals western powers’ imperialistic tendencies toward and colonialist impositions on it. By providing a brief overview of Iran–West encounters since the nineteenth century, this essay sets the stage for understanding how postcolonialism is relevant to the Iranian context. It then attempts to trace the main elements which have conditioned the reception and development of postcolonial perspectives in Iran. Drawing briefly on the work of Iranian religious and political thinkers, it seeks to highlight the role of political Islam in promoting anti-imperialist discourses and practices which led to Iran's Islamic Revolution one year after the publication of Said's Orientalism (1978). Yet there has been no systematic development of postcolonial studies in Iran and indeed the arrival of postcolonial theory has been rather late – as late as the mid-2000s. Notwithstanding this situation, the first decade of the twenty-first century saw a flourishing of cultural studies which seems to have aroused an interest in postcolonial debates both within Iranian academia and research centers affiliated with the government. This research argues postcolonialism has been empowering for the multicultural society of Iran in the sense that it has provided Iranians with a critical framework to question lingering imperialistic legacies and to deal more effectively with current national and international issues, both in academia and in society.