Böcker av Peyman Vahabzadeh

For Land and Culture offers the first comprehensive account of a long forgotten and neglected grassroots movement. In the wake of Iran's 1979 revolution, Turkmen peasants collectively occupied their ancestral lands, which had been seized through colonial modernization, land registry and land reform under the Pahlavi monarchy. The book chronicles this movement using theoretical and historical engagement with the modern councils and offers a detailed account of the "land question" in Iran's colonial modernization. The book describes the systematic dispossession of Turkmen communities from some of the most fertile areas in Iran. Vahabzadeh shows how Turkmen land occupation in 1979 led to a sophisticated council system that offered a practical politics of semi-autonomous, democratic self-governance in the face of hostile militias and other forces of the nascent authoritarian Islamic Republic. With social justice as one of its unshakable pillars, the Turkmen council movement took back land as commons and abolished capitalist private ownership of land, providing an alternative to top-down politics until it was defeated by the state through a combination of military terror and assimilation. Although short lived, the radically democratic movement connected with global struggles of Indigenous Peoples and autonomous movements who had broken away from patriarchal state forms and capitalist domination.

Examines how the arts popularised militant resistance to the monarchy in 1970s Iran At a time of growing state control, censorship and wholesale crackdown on opposition in post-1953 Iran, intellectuals and artists began to produce works that defied the Shah's dictatorship and the regime's 'Great Civilisation' propaganda. With the emergence of urban guerrilla warfare in 1971 - spearheaded by the Marxist People's Fadai Guerrillas (PFG) - dissident artists created symbolic works that popularised the militants' ideas through artistic depictions and tropes, while portraying the militants as immortal freedom-fighters. The arts of defiance thus swayed young educated Iranians, as well as certain layers of the public, to perceive the state through the eyes of its most radical critiques: militant dissidents. By closely examining and interpreting the poetry, fiction, songs and films of the 1960s and 1970s, this book uncovers how militant action was translated into artistic expressions and vice versa. It also explores how the PFG militants - who were few in number - were able to acquire a 'heroic' dimension in the eyes of the public, portraying a symbolic image of defiance far beyond their actual militant existence. Key Features  The first comprehensive study of the relationship between the arts and revolutionary action of Iranian dissidents of the 1970s  Examines popular poets (Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Khosrow Golesorkhi), writers (Sadeq Chubak, Samad Behrangi, Gholam Hossein Sa'edi), filmmakers (Massoud Kimiai, Amir Naderi, Ebrahim Golestan), lyricists (Shahyar Ghanbari and Iraj Janantie-Atai) and singers (Farhad Mehrad and Dariush Eghbali)  Provides an analytical approach that reveals how arts and action are braided and inseparable through symbols and semiosis Peyman Vahabzadeh is Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria. He is the author of many books, including A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy and the Fadai Discourse of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (2010) and A Rebel's Journey: Mostafa Sho'aiyan and Revolutionary Theory in Iran (2019).

The first in-depth study of Iran's maverick liberation theorist of the twentieth century