Nationalism on Stage - Theatre in Iran

The Project
To date, little attention has been paid to modern art forms as an expression of secular and anti-Islamic movements; at most the topic was skimmed over in cultural and socio-historical studies on the Middle Eastern region. Both modernist literary figures whose thinking was influenced by Western concepts of nationalism and the Pahlavi state saw their task as shaping a modern national conscious. The preferred medium for advocating their secular concepts of morality and modernity was the theatre. This project seeks to examine nationalism in Iran at a time when no other mass media existed apart from the press, and theatre played an important role as a vehicle for communicating nationalist ideas. The aim is to reach socio-historical conclusions about the way the Iranian state’s modernization policy was disseminated and its social reception by the multimedia phenomenon of the theatre. A key issue in analysing the ideological effectiveness of the theatre is the extent to which this secular art form projected the image of an anti-Islamic movement.

Prof Dr Christoph Werner

Tehran