Iranian Cosmopolitanism A Cinematic History The Global Middle East Series

From popular and 'New Wave' pre-revolutionary films of Fereydoon Goleh and Abbas Kiarostami to post-revolutionary films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian cinema has produced a range of films and directors that have garnered international fame and earned a global following. Golbarg Rekabtalaei takes a unique look at Iranian cosmopolitanism and how it transformed in the Iranian imagination through the cinematic lens. By examining the development of Iranian cinema from the early twentieth century to the revolution, Rekabtalaei locates discussions of modernity in Iranian cinema as rooted within local experiences, rather than being primarily concerned with Western ideals or industrialisation. Her research further illustrates how the ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of Iran's citizenry shaped a heterogeneous culture and a cosmopolitan cinema that was part and parcel of Iran's experience of modernity. In turn, this cosmopolitanism fed into an assertion of sovereignty and national identity in a modernising Iran in the decades leading up to the revolution.

Introduction; 1. Cinematic imaginaries and cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century; 2. Cinematic education, cinematic sovereignty: the creation of a cosmo-national cinema; 3. Industrial professionalisation: the emergence of a 'national' commercial cinema; 4. 'Film-Farsi': everyday constituencies of a cosmopolitan popular cinema; 5. Cinematic revolution: cosmopolitan alter-cinema of pre-revolutionary Iran; Conclusion.

Golbarg Rekabtalaei is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern history at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto in 2015. She is interested in the relationships between cinematic image and space, modernity, cosmopolitanism, urbanisation, nationalism, and revolutions. Her research specifically focuses on the role of cinema, in concrete form and onscreen, in facilitating cosmopolitan imaginations and hybrid subjectivities in early twentieth-century Tehran. Rekabtalaei was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at North Carolina State University from 2015 to 2017.