In thinking about the relations of Iran and the West questions arise immediately about the definitions of the two terms. While “the West” signifies some ambiguous geographical/cultural/racial/political entity that is understood to be non-homogenous by virtue of the fact that…
From Refashioning Iran, p 4: Modernity can be viewed a product of a globalizing network of power and knowledge that informed the heterotopic experiences of crisscrossing peoples and cultures and thus provided multiple scenarios of self-refashioning. Whereas Europeans reconstituted the…
From Refashioning Iran, p9: In the mid-seventeenth century a purely self-congratulatory view of European civilization as the paragon of universal reason and the concurring “blackmail of the Enlightenment” had not yet been formed. Similarly, Europe’s Oriental-Other had not yet been…