The Unveiled Apple: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Limits of Inter-discursiveInterpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art
In the past two decades, Iranian contemporary art has been eagerly embraced byinternational art venues. The transportation of artworks from Tehran to mostlywestern European and North American cultural centers entails inter-discursivetranslations that will render them legible for their reception in a new context. Thispaper argues that bound up in these translations are performative acts of language thatlabel these artworks as markers of ethnic alterity, unexplored localities and most of thetime associates them with issues of gender and femininity (and therefore limited to thevocabulary of “veil,” “plight of women” and “sexual inequality”). Looking at a seven-minute piece of video-art by Ghazaleh Hedayat entitled Eve’s Apple (2006), thearticle examines this predicament and the possibilities for the artists to circumvent it.It argues that Hedayat’s video enables an observation of the performative dominance ofWestern discourses of art history that mark the limits of inter-discursive interpretationin disciplines such as art history and art criticism.
In memory of Mohsen Ebrāhim (1951–2010), author, poet, and translator of theworks of Dino Buzzati and Italo Calvino into Persian.
Among the many quandaries that contemporary visual artists from the non-West arefacing today is the question of how to reckon with the problem of creating any piecethat is not re-articulated and interpreted as an immobile reductive signifier of theirethnicity and historical background in the Western contexts of the reception oftheir works. Now, more than thirty years since the publication of Edward Said’s(1978) Orientalism,1 more than twenty years after Timothy Mitchell’s (1989)
Foad Torshizi is a doctoral student at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and AfricanStudies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in the City ofNew York, New York, USA. This essay benefited enormously from the comments of Melissa Rose Heer,Jane M. Blocker, Hamid Dabashi, Catherine Asher, Robert Silberman, Hamid Reza Severi, NegarMottahedeh, Farbod Honarpisheh and my fellow panelists at the MESA annual conference in 2010in San Diego. I should like to thank them all for their help and generosity. I am solely responsible forall of the remaining shortcomings in this essay.
“Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,”2 and fifteen years after Néstor GarcíaCanclini’s (1998) “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multicul-turalism,”3 still the marginalization of artists of the non-West remains as vexing and asforceful as it has always been.4 This situation, thus far, has given rise to various strat-egies that seek to resist and decentralize the dominant narratives, which have continu-ously rendered the non-West as secondary to the West. Perhaps, in the realm ofcontemporary art, this is most clearly visible in how artists of the non-West areremoved from the contemporariness of contemporary art and their artworks are con-stantly demoted as representations of the fixed image of their locality. This removal ismost visible in two different discursive tropes: first, in Western art criticism literature5
there is a tendency to portray non-Western and, specific to this paper, Iranian art astethered to long-established ethnic, religious and national traditions and, second, thereis a refusal of this literature to interpret such artworks as equally advanced in compari-son to current Western art practices and styles.To invoke this literature in the context of the reception of the contemporary art of
Iran, it suffices to recall how the discourses of contemporary art history have often sha-dowed the work of Iranian artists through an inexorable fabricated relation to theircountry’s ancient history or its current political situation.While one should relentlesslyquestion the validity of historical periodization such as ancient, medieval and modern,this very “ancient history” of Iran is an ahistorical Orientalist trope posing as historicalauthenticity. Moreover, in many instances Iranian artists are accused of drawing fromtheir Western “prototypes.” Examples are not hard to find: Shirin Neshat is comparedto Cindy Sherman;6 Vahid Sharifian is called the Iranian Jeff Koons in the New York
2Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and Exhibitionary Order,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicho-las Mirzoeff (London and New York, 1998), 495–518. First published in 1989 in Comparative Studies inSociety and History 9 (CSSH) 31 (Cambridge).
3Néstor García Canclini, “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism,”in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York, 1998), 180–89.
4I find it necessary to acknowledge that this situation is also extendable to other marginal divisions ofthe so-called “global world,” such as women in a highly phallocentric social order, or minorities of sexualorientation in dominantly heteronormative societies and is not limited to the binaries of West versusnon-West.
5It is necessary here to draw a line between some art-historical academic writings that are fully aware ofthe politics of marginalization and have consistently contributed to a corpus of critical account on thesepolitics and the uncritical literature predominantly emanating from galleries, museums, curatorial initiat-ives and public media. I do not mean to imply that all of the accounts written in the Western context ofreception of Iranian art have been uncritical and in lack of a clear understanding of relations of power. Infact the works I have mentioned earlier, i.e., Said’s Orientalism and Mitchell’s “Orientalism and Exhibi-tionary Order,” were both produced in this context. While I remain critical of many scholars who sufferfrom the lack of a critical approach to the politics of display and representation, I maintain that the lit-erature I am reexamining and critiquing here is mostly produced outside academia, in galleries, museums’public educational programs and public media, all of which have the advantage of incommensurably morepublic exposure than academic literature.
6See Mitra Monir Abbaspour, “Trans-national, Cultural, and Corporeal Spaces: The Territory of theBody in the Artwork of Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum” (MA thesis, University of California, River-side, 2001).
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Times;7 the Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art finds a juxtaposition of Shadi Ghadir-ian’s work with Cindy Sherman to be “eye opening”;8 andMartin Gayford, the chief artcritic for BloombergNews based in London finds touches of Sherman andDuchamp inGhadirian’s series entitled Everyday Life.9
Another apposite example of the same kind of treatment of the art of the non-Westappears in Anna Somers Cocks’s article “Are We Colonializing Middle Eastern Art?,”which was published in The Art Newspaper in August 2009. Cocks’s essay, troubled byhegemonic narratives of Western art, is worth discussing at length because it perfectlyillustrates how legitimate concerns about domination and reorientation of MiddleEastern art by theWest can subtly advocate the exclusion of non-Western contemporary
Figure 1. Vahid Sharifian, Untitled, 2007–2008 [From the series Queen of the Jungle,Digital print on metallic paper, 23 × 34 cm], courtesy of the artist.
7In a review published in theNew York Times in June 2009, Randy Kennedy quotes Sam Bardouil, thecurator of Chelsea Art Museum’s show Iran Inside Out, as he calls Vahid Sharifian “the Jeff Koons ofIran.” See Randy Kennedy, “In Chelsea, Art Intersects With Reality of Iranian Conflict,” TheNew York Times, 26 June 2009.
9Martin Gayford, “Saatchi Shows Veiled Women Made of Foil, Iran Sex-Worker Dolls,” BloombergNews, 29 January 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=muse&sid=awSG3eIMpgsE (accessed 27 June 2010).
artists from the centrality of contemporary art debates and ultimately feed into the nar-ratives they aspire to dismantle. Cocks, the general editorial director of The Art Newspa-per, warns us that the “fragile plant” ofMiddle Eastern art can be trained in one directionor another by Western art institutes, like the Chinese avant-garde of the last few years,since “it is still the western art institutions and western money, both pro bono and com-mercial, that give validation to contemporary art anywhere in the world.”10 Criticizing
Figure 2. Shadi Ghadirian, Untitled, 1998–2001 [From the series Qajar Photography,Digital print Photograph, Gelatin-silver bromide print, 23.97 × 16.19 cm.], courtesyof the artist.
10Anna Somers Cocks, “AreWeColonializingMiddle Eastern Art? NoOneNeedsWestern-style ‘FineArt’ with Some Orientalist Flourishes,” The Art Newspaper, 204 (July/August 2009), http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Are-we-colonialising-Middle-Eastern-art?/18604 (accessed 28 June 2010).
the policies made by some London museums such as the Tate Modern and the BritishMuseum towards the contemporary art of the Middle East, Cocks writes:
The conceptual work, film and photography are being sought by the Tate, whilecalligraphic work, the art that has the most deep-rooted following in the MiddleEast, will go into the British Museum. This sounds very reasonable, except thatthe market follows the lead of the Tate, not the British Museum, because of thekey role the Tate has in the international art system. The decisive power ofmoney will come down behind the Tate’s choices, inevitably affecting whatartists choose to produce. If this happens we will be artistically the poorer, whichis why it is good to hear of a museum initiative that seems to be sensitive to theneed to nurture an art that does not just mimic our own.11
The danger Cocks has astutely delineated here is the eradication of different dialects ofthe visual arts due toWestern institutions’minimal tolerance for artworks that are noteasily decodable, where the meaning is not readily on the surface of the work and thatrequire arduous efforts of translation. However, she goes too far on this note to suggestthat artists of the Middle East should be put back into their “deep-rooted” traditions.Although she is absolutely right that the last thing we need is “western-style ‘fine art’with some orientalist flourishes,” she fails to complicate the notion of “western-style”art (read “any form of contemporary global practice, such as video, performance,installation, and so forth”) and how these modes of art production are monopolizedby “western artists.” There is little space in her writing to rethink the institutionaldemand for art from the non-West to be visually loyal to its geography of originand not to “mimic” the West, what is “our own.” In other words, although Cocks’slegitimate concern about the hegemony of one language in contemporary art manifestsher keen observation of the current predicaments in the global art market, her pre-scription for artists from the non-West ends in a more dangerous spot that excludesnon-Western artists from any dialog except about their locality, ethnicity, andhistorical background.In an entirely different geography, but in response to the same propensity of
Western discourses of art criticism and art history to marginalize the non-West,the Argentinean artist Sebastian López has argued that “while the European artistis allowed to investigate other cultures and enrich their own works and perspective,it is expected that the artist from another culture only works in the backgroundand the artistic traditions connected to his or her place of origin.”12 He furthersummarizes this situation by stating that “if a foreign artist does not conform tothis separation, he is considered inauthentic, Westernized, and an imitator copyistof ‘what we do.’ The universal is ours, the local is yours.”13
11Cocks, “Are We Colonializing Middle Eastern Art?”12Sebastian López’s statement is quoted in Canclini, “Remaking Passports,” 187.13Canclini, “Remaking Passports.”
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Lopez’s statement articulates the intricacy and insidiousness of the networks ofpower, domination, and marginalization that are still at the heart of contemporaryart. While the contemporary moment pretends to celebrate multiculturalism and cos-mopolitanism and continuously asserts its tolerance for difference within a global artmarket, marginalization functions through less visible and complex networks. This isto say that the politics of marginalization have gradually produced more intricate andless visible means of rendering the non-West secondary to the West than the blatantmodes of marginalization previously at play. These politics have resulted in an unequaleconomy of meaning production that does not try to exclude artists of the non-West,but instead limits the interpretation of their works to a predetermined vocabulary thatechoes their ethnic background and thus accelerates their marginalization. This situ-ation, I will argue, is the outcome of the politics of inter-cultural or, more accurately,inter-discursive translation. Put differently, it is through the inter-discursive trans-lation of the visual, departing from one context or discourse and arriving atanother, that processes of marginalization take place.This paper is an attempt to examine this situation further and look into the pos-
sibilities of resisting it. In order to do so, I will look at the Iranian contemporaryartist, Ghazaleh Hedayat, who has foregrounded this issue in her oeuvre and hasstriven to fight it on different fronts by way of both creating her artwork—thusnot endorsing silence—and preempting abusive readings of it. I will argue that thegradual evolution in her work from figural representation to non-figural abstractionhas deliberately aimed to show the very limits of inter-discursive translation in orderto destabilize the politics of domination and marginalization that are inexorablyintertwined with it. Hedayat’s strategy, to which I will refer as non-figural abstrac-tion, despite its risks and failures, I propose, has been an effective way to resist theencompassing characteristics of Euro-American-centrism in discourses of contempor-ary art and therefore should be regarded as a significant mode of resistance to themore cunning and complicated methods of marginalization. After situatingHedayat’s work in the historical context pertinent to her work, I will try to offera reading of her video entitled Eve’s Apple (2006), which does not conform to thepredetermined vocabulary often used in writing about artists of the Middle East.However, I will remain fully aware that my very own act of interpretation fallsunder the same rubric, namely inter-discursive translation. My point here is not torefuse translation, but to maintain a self-reflexive position that foregrounds thelimits of translation and endorses them as creative potentials for further interpret-ations. In the second half of this paper, through a closer study of her work, I willattempt to expose the methodical transformation from figural representation toabstraction in Hedayat’s oeuvre in order to examine it as a strategy of resistanceagainst dominant narratives of marginalization. It is important to look moreclosely at this strategy of resistance, I maintain, as it offers a fresh understandingof the configurations of highly animate relations of power and hegemony in aglobal art world and the emerging modes of resistance.I am interested in the way that Hedayat’s non-conformity to a readily accessible
visual regime signifying “Iranian-ness” complicates not only common reductive read-
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ings of Iranian artwork and artists, but also the wider assumption that the West acts asan authoritative translator of global visual language. Hedayat’s use of abstraction is amethod of resistance to the translation that occurs when easily recognizable signifiersstand in for “the Orient” in a Western-dominated art market. By moving towardsabstraction, and away from easily decodable visual signifiers of Iran, she both aimsto resist a localized narrative for her work and also calls for reflection on the inherentlyuntenable relationship between art objects and an artist’s identity.When I look at Hedayat’s work as a critically intervening force within the politics
of translation, I am referring to the way in which translation has been articulated anddefined by scholars such as Jacques Derrida and Lydia Liu. The image of the West asthe authoritative translator of art is coterminous with what Derrida identifies as the“hegemony of the homogeneous.”14 InMonolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesisof Origin, Derrida asserts that the context in which meaning is produced is a politicalterrain. Context is always non-natural. It enforces homo-hegemony and this means thatit always privileges one language over the others. Historically speaking, the dominanceof colonial sovereignties brought about the weakening, or in some cases even the utterobliteration, of many languages and consequently the ultimate advantage of onelanguage, i.e. the language of the colonizer, over the others. Thus we have arrived at“the hegemony of the homogenous. This can be verified everywhere, everywherethis homo-hegemony remains at work in the culture, effacing the folds and flatteningthe text.”15 Moreover, this privileging comes hand-in-hand with the exclusion of whatdisturbs and destabilizes this hegemonic homogeneity.16 This flattening of the text,about which Derrida warns us, is produced and perpetuated through the hegemonyof the language of art history and criticism that has itself often been limited to a voca-bulary that corroborates the politics of Western-centrism. This is not to say thatEnglish, or any other dominant European language, does not offer the possibility ofaccurate and loyal translations/interpretations of non-Western visual artworks, butthat the context of interpretation, which, as Derrida puts it, is always a non-naturalimposed “homo-homogeneity,” in the contemporary art world conforms withWestern-centrism and thus anchors the processes of meaning production in themuddy waters of cultural domination and marginalization of the non-West.17
Through a more political and historically grounded analysis, Lydia Liu traces cul-tural dominance and its relation to inter-cultural translation in the interactionbetween China and Britain. In her 2004 book The Clash of Empires: The Inventionof China in Modern World Making Liu describes the structure of power relations inthe context of inter-discursive translation through her theorization of the notion ofthe super-sign. Liu defines the super-sign as “a linguistic monstrosity that thrives on
14Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by PatrickMensah (Stanford, CA, 1996), 40.
15Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 40–41.16Jonathan Roffe, “Translation,” in Understanding Derrida, ed. Jack Raynolds and Jonathan Roffe
(London and New York, 2004), 105.17Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, edited by Gerald Graff, translated by Jeffery Mehlman and Samuel
Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 133.
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the excess of its presumed meanings by virtue of being exposed to, or thrown togetherwith, foreign etymologies and foreign languages.”18 She refers to a historical incidentwhere the Chinese word yi 夷 (“foreigners”) was translated as “barbarian” by Britishpeople in China during the Sino-British encounter, the use of which in legal docu-ments was officially banned in the Treaty of Tianjin at the insistence of the Britishfor its derogatory implications. Liu argues that the translation as “barbarian” for theword yi 夷, which was meant to refer to foreigners in China, the prohibition of itsuse and its subsequent vanishing from the Chinese language was a result of theencounter between the two divergent contexts (English and Chinese) in which onedominated the other, expropriated this word and put an end to its life or at leastmade it invisible for a long time.19 Liu’s provocative example serves as a model tolook at contemporary inter-cultural encounters in which translation is more covertlyat play in the transportation of the visual, which supposedly communicates with aninternational language not in need of translation. Liu’s model sheds light on themore obscure elements involved in the act of inter-cultural translation that arenever disentangled from politics.Perhaps the most familiar super-sign that comes to mind in the context of contem-
porary Iranian art is the worn-out figure of the veil. Within the limits of this paper Iwill not be able to trace the history of the veil as a proliferating visual element and itscontinuous presence in the contemporary visual culture and art of Iran, but I willutilize Liu’s model in order to delve into some recent examples of the reception ofIranian art in theWest and back in Iran. It is worth mentioning that the visual appear-ance of the veil has been, and still is, the most easily accessible icon in the contempor-ary visual representation—or perhaps I should say misrepresentation—of the figure ofIranian women. At times it is hard to find any account written on Iranian womenartists of which the central, or at least one of the central, arguments is not formedaround the issue of the veil.20
Some recent examples of these accounts are necessary in order to emphasize howprevalent they are in the current discourses of art criticism. It is small wonder thatthe veil appears at the center of all of the interpretations that I will bring here asexamples to illustrate my point. But the proliferation of the localization of theIranian artists is not to be solely blamed on the West. Aligned with the politics of mar-ginalization and localization of contemporary Iranian artists are the cultural policies ofthe incumbent Iranian government in promoting nationalism in art, which has grewexponentially since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2005.
18Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge,MA, 2004), 13.
19Liu, The Clash of Empires, 32–34.20For example see the interview with the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat by Artemis Papanika that has
been given the title of “Shirin Neshat: A Voice for Women in Veil” in Oneculture daily website of artand culture (April 2009). http://www.onculture.eu/story.aspx?s_id=729&z_id=31 (accessed 29 June2010). Also see Hamid Dabashi’s critique of Scott McDonald’s interview with Shirin Neshat in “Trans-cending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” in Shirin Neshat: la Última Palabra, ed. HamidDabashi, Shirin Neshat and Octavio Zaya (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2005), 61.
Thus, it is not only Western art venues that expect Iranian artists to somehow includethe veil in their artworks, but also it is an internal policy to allow only those artistsfrom Iran to represent the country in international venues who strictly follow anational regime of signifiers, including the veil. Although these cultural policiesinside Iran seem to have accelerated more recently, we should not forget that themarginalization and localization of Iranian contemporary artists have not beenlimited to the past few years.In fact, many Iranian artists, with the exception of those who celebrate this predica-
ment and exploit it to their benefit,21 have long wrestled with the global politics of rep-resentation and display, during the time in which their works have played a major roleon the stage of the so-called “world art.” From participating in significant internationalbiennales to numerous shows of imported artworks either from Iran or from theMiddleEast, Iranian visual artists have practiced an extraordinary presence in comparisonto their peers from “the region.” The most recent examples of these internationalexhibitions include the Venice Art Biennales in 2005 and 2009; the Saatchi gallery’sUnveiled: New Art from the Middle East show in 2009 in London; and the ChelseaArt Museum’s Iran Inside Out in New York City from June to September 2009. Thelatter, in particular, exploited its fortuitous coincidence with the Green movement inIran as the opening of the show came shortly after Iran’s turmoil in June 2009,which occupied the headlines of almost every major news agency in the world.While these are a few examples that I will discuss here, it is not far-fetched to argue
that in almost every contemporary show that has exhibited artworks from Iran in thepast two decades, Iranian artists have played the role of a constitutive absence that con-structs the margins of Western art discourses and maintains their centrality. What Imean by this constitutive absence is not to say that they are literally excluded fromglobal art exhibition, but it is precisely in their presence as secondary to the Westthat they define the margins of what is considered serious, critical, advanced, andcomplex art. The examples here are to illustrate the propensity of many contemporaryart venues to stake out an “imaginative geography” in which the artists struggle withbackward and primitive societies and consequently to reduce the works of manyIranian artists into tokens of their ethnic alterity and the falsely manufactured pastnessattached to the name of their country.22 The few examples here demonstrate differentstrategies of the exclusion of Iranian artists from critical debates in contemporary art,depriving them of the possibility to engage in narratives that are liberated from theirethnicity. This is all done under the shadow of their ethnic and racial difference,forcing them to serve as manifestations of the rest of the world in the infamousequation of the West and the rest.
21To name only a few examples look at 6 Video Arts (2004–5) by Mania Akbari, photograph series TheLoss of Our Identity by Sadegh Tirafkan, or Shahram Entekhabi’s 72 Virgins (2009). All three artists haveuncritically celebrated orientalized and sexualized renditions of Iranian women and have solidified themin their own works. Or see the sudden change in Fereidoon Omidi’s oeuvre from abstract painting toworks that are overcrowded with Persian calligraphy, after the success of Iranian calligraphy-painters,such as Mohammad Ehsai, at Christie’s in Dubai in February 2006.
22Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 59.
Interpretation of Iranian Contemporary Art 557
In his essay on Shirin Neshat, “Transcending the Boundaries of an ImaginativeGeography” published in 2005, Hamid Dabashi acerbically points to some examplesof reductive interpretations ofNeshat’s work such as reviewswritten by ScottMcDonaldor Francesco Bonami.23 Dabashi elaborates further on these politics by using the term“arrested vocabulary,” by which he refers to a predetermined vocabulary that flattensNeshat’s work into a comment on the plight of women in “violent Islamic” countriesand fails to account for its semiotic complexity.24 Dabashi asserts:
There is an imaginative geography at work in the heart of that geopolitics of recep-tion that is impossible to miss and unwise to ignore. It is impossible to read any-thing on Shirin Neshat these days written by someone having already imaginedhimself or herself inside a hermetically sealed sort of Andy Warhol’s CampbellSoup Can code-named “the West” without reaching for a red pen and markingthe number of times that phrases such as “repressed Iranian/Muslim woman”appear and mar any serious conversation with her work.25
Dabashi’s analysis of the geopolitics of the reception of Neshat’s work most effectivelydescribes the situation of contemporary art’s current discourses. Since 2005, when hiscritique of readings of Neshat was published, a single glance at exhibition cataloguesand art reviews suffices to find numerous examples that fall under the same rubric ofreductive interpretation.One other instance of these reductive readings, with an entirely different agenda,
namely promoting conformity to local visual vocabularies, is evident in the officialfifty-third Venice Biennale’s bulletin, Exhibart. During the course of this biennalein 2009, Exhibart exalted Iran’s pavilion for being able to remain loyal to its culturalheritage. “Iranian art, after many years,” writes Exhibart’s reporter, “has shown orig-inality at the Venice Biennale. It has shown what really is original and is not tryingto satisfy a Western taste.”26 What the Venice Biennale’s Exhibart considered “orig-inal” Iranian art was a selection of artworks by Iraj Eskandari, Mahmoud Avishi,and Sedaghat Jabbari that clearly manifest a national identity through systematicregimentations of Persian and Islamic visual signifiers. The works of these artists,
23Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 31–85.24Given Neshat’s immigration to the United States in her teenage years and the formation of her art
career in the US, one might quite reasonably dispute that she should not be simply categorized as anIranian artist. However, for better or for worse, not only has she been continuously regarded to as anIranian artist and included in art shows presenting artists from Iran, but also she has been portrayedas the “voice” of the Iranian women, an attribution that in fact Neshat has always resented. Therefore,it is pertinent to argue that even her association with the voice of the Iranian women is part of a biggerpolitics of representation and display that resists accepting Neshat as simply an artist rather than an“Iranian artist.”
25Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 59 and 61 (English trans-lation is printed only on odd pages).
26Iranian Students News Agency, “ISNA—06-09-2009—88/3/19—1353513.” ISNA—IranianStudents’ News Agency, http://isna.ir/ISNA/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-1353513.
especially of Iraj Eskandari, with his painting series of deformed Achaemenid figureswith different color variations, and Sedaghat Jabbari with a large number of Persiancalligraphy-paintings, exhibit a confinement to a regime of local visual elements,which, contrary to Exhibart’s claim, seek to satisfy Western taste besides theirpatron’s demands. What in fact was celebrated by Exhibart was the Iranian artists’self-denial to partake in a critical dialog that does not only concern their ethnic back-ground but also engages in broader narratives—narratives such as gender, biopolitics,post-humanity, and so forth that are addressed by Western artists quite frequently.What we witness in Exhibart is the coaxing of the artists from the non-West toremain local and employ a visual regime that can be easily translated using whatDabashi has rightly termed as “arrested verbal vocabulary.”27
Figure 3. Shirin Neshat, Untitled, 1997 [From the seriesWomen of Allah], courtesy ofBarbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
27Dabashi, “Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography,” 59.
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A more recent example of this kind of rhetorical gesture is strikingly evident in theChelsea Art Museum’s show, Iran Inside Out, which included more than fifty Iranianartists from “inside” Iran and diasporic artists from the “outside.” Sam Bardouil, thecurator of the show, juxtaposes two disparate artworks: a portrait of a young boy lyingon a wooden box, which is a pen on canvas drawing by Ahmad Morshedloo and aphoto-installation by ShahramEntekhabi, in which he filled thewall on top of the paint-ingwith prostitutes’ advertising cards that are censoredwith a blackmarkermaking themappear as if they are wearing the chador. There, the curator makes a bizarre connectionbetween the two works, implying that the prostitutes in Entekhabi’s work are in thedreams of the young sleeping boy in Morshedloo’s extraordinarily executed painting.In an egregious, crude remark, Bardouil suggests that the sexual fantasies of Iranianmale teenagers are confiscated by Iran’s theocratic government and argues that this jux-taposition is a critique of that—as if, as a curator, he has the right to create an absurdcollage with the works of artists who are participating in his show in order to manufac-ture a new work that better satisfies his audience, which back in June 2009 was yearningto know more about Iranian politics than its art. Ironically, young Iranian men’s sexualfantasies, as Bardouil suggests, are directed toward Western prostitutes.In a documentary video about the show, posted on Chelsea Art Museum’s website,
he says:
Right next to me here, we have an amazing painting of a huge scale by an artist wholives in the inside. His name is Ahmad Morshedloo. And it is of a man lying in hisbed, more like a teenager and that’s why I wanted it to be on the ground level to givethe idea that he is really lying on his bed. Right on top of it, there’s this amazinginstallation by this artist who lives in Berlin. His name is Shahram Entekhabi,who since 2002 has been collecting real prostitute cards and covering them withthe chador, saying that the complete revealing of the woman or complete coveringof the woman is the same thing, because you are looking at the woman as a sexobject. Now by juxtaposing the two works at such close proximity I wanted tokind of make a joke and say that probably inside the country, even a man’s fantasieshave been confiscated and they have been covered [laughing]. So that was just a littlecuratorial interjection on my behalf.28
Perhaps it was in the wake of the serendipity of the show with Iran’s upheaval inSummer 2009 that Bardouil found his “curatorial interjection,” namely, the manipu-lation of two disparate artworks by faking a relationship between them, to be notonly legitimate but also a benevolent effort that gives voice to silenced Iranians. Ironi-cally, it was during this time that the world was watching, on the news, thousands ofyoung Iranian women and men protesting side-by-side on the streets of Tehran. Onemight argue that Bardouil’s superficial approach is an exceptional instance and doesnot represent curatorial tendencies more generally. I agree. But through a few examples
28Iran: Inside Out. Documentary Video, digital format (New York, 2009), http://chelseaartmuseum.org/exhibits/2009/iraninsideout/index.html (emphases added).
I have offered so far, I have tried to outline different strategies that are deployed by whatis perhaps the majority of Western art curators and critics in order not to excludeIranian artists but to present them in a highly distorted manner, which ultimatelyends in their exclusion from the contemporariness of contemporary art. The samegoes for the majority of other non-Western artists around the globe. A brief look atcontemporary art is enough to realize that even the most celebrated artists of thenon-West have been continuously read only in relation to their ethnic background.29
Yet Western curators and critics are not alone in employing this arrested verbalvocabulary to discuss and interpret contemporary Iranian art. The dominance ofthis vocabulary has simultaneously played a significant role in the reshaping of localdiscourses of art. A recent example of this is clearly visible in Barbad Golshiri’s“For They Know What They Do Know” in e-flux journal. While in a verboseaccount of contemporary Iranian art Golshiri criticizes orientalist renditions of theart of Iran, he falls into the same trap of positioning himself outside the politicsthat he denigrates and accusing some Iranian artists of becoming agents of “homogen-izing forces” and “supporting the aestheticization of stereotypes.”30 What Golshiri issuggesting here, by these relatively vague terms, is that many of the Iranian artists, bymeans of aestheticizing the homogenized stereotypes of the Orient, have satisfied theglobal art market’s ravenousness and in fact functioned as accomplices to Westerndiscourses of marginalization by solidifying and confirming their flattened renditionsof the Other. Here, it seems to me that Golshiri is wrong on both of his assertions. Forhis idea that the artists help with the homogenization of the region is based on apremise that cultural domination necessarily seeks homogenization and the ultimateobliteration of difference. This premise fails to account for complex strategies ofthe machines of social identity that create innumerable differences and representthem as expressions of ethnic alterity. To argue that the so-called Orient is a hetero-geneous entity is to insist on an almost indisputable and widely accepted fact and thusis to miss the battleground. Western discourses of contemporary art, I maintain, cele-brate the multiplicity of this phantasmagoric geography. What is at stake and in needof resistance, however, is that whatever comprises this heterogeneous entity is definedas what-is-not-the-West and thus has always occupied the position of the secondary,the marginalized, in the dichotomy of the West and the non-West. The West’sendorsement of the internal differences of a geographical region, which has enduredmarginalization in its totality, should by no means be assumed equal to the eradicationof hierarchy. The highly differentiated and diverse “region” of the Middle East remains
29To name just a couple of prominent artists who endure the same reductive readings, the Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo and Chéri Samba, from Congo, have both been rarely interpreted beyond theconfinements caused by their “different” ethnic background.
30Barbad Golshiri, “For They KnowWhat They Do Know,” e-flux Journal, no. 8 (2009), http://www.e- flux.com/journal/view/80. Some of the artists Golshiri lambasts in this essay include Shirin Aliabadi,Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Shojaa Azari and Farhad Moshiri. He writes: “Shadi Ghadirian, FarhadMoshiri, Ghazel, and Shirin Ali-Abadi perpetuate the dominant image [of Iranian woman in the veil] in avery direct way; no pentimenti or “curvatures” are there to be seen. They take advantage of doxa and hege-mony and submit to it in the name of subversion” (Golshiri, “For They Know What They Do Know”).
secondary to the “center of the world” and serves as a sideshow for the West’s curiouscitizens. Second, by suggesting that the Iranian artists support and feed into theprocedures of aestheticization of stereotypes, Golshiri has failed to hold responsiblethose who have fabricated these stereotypes and instead has given the full agency ofthe aestheticization of homogenized stereotypes to the artists.Criticizing Saatchi’s Unveiled newsletter for conflating Arabs and Iranians, Golshiri
is right to some degree to point out that the dominant producers of social identity andethnic alterity, or, in his words, those who are “the holders of such discourses,” tend toabandon dissimilar qualities and manufacture essentialist and homogenizing readingsof the so-called “region.” But what is intriguing is his own failure to liberate himselffrom the very same literature he lambasts. Associating Shirin Neshat with what wasdisturbingly termed in Iran as “chador art” or accusing Shirin Ali-Abadi of supporting“the constructed mass by attributing to it an ethnic, geographic, cultural, or politicalreality to homogenize diversity and difference,”31 are examples of the reshaping ofIranian local discourse of contemporary art in conformity withWestern art discourses’arrested vocabulary, par excellence. In fact, the anxiety in the language of many Iraniancritics, such as Golshiri or Hamid Keshmirshekan, about exoticism suggests that thereis an inherent presence of the West in their modes of thinking as the ultimate spec-tator.32 However, I do not mean to imply that thinking about exoticism should becompletely abandoned, as I acknowledge its substantial effects on the contemporaryart of Iran and other non-Western geographies. What I want to argue, instead, isthat laying bare the preoccupation of Iranian critics with terms such as exoticism or“chador art,” which have proliferated in the past two decades, demonstrates thatalthough the specter of the West is not clearly manifest in the local discourses ofcontemporary Iranian art, it is undisputedly present.Saatchi’s show, Exhibart’s review, or Bardouil’s remarks, as some primary examples,
indicate the violence that occurs during the inter-cultural translation of contemporaryart from marginalized countries to culturally dominant empires of art and culture.While the visual arts are sometimes characterized as not needing translation, assomehow a kind of universal language, a much more intricate network of inter-discursive translation with a subtle movement and a concealed architecture ofpower relations is at play in the presentation of the visual across borders. Withinthis context, Ghazaleh Hedayat’s oeuvre is significant not only in that it reveals thishidden architecture, but also in that she seeks new forms of resisting it. “There isno need to fear or hope,” as Deleuze has once said, “but only to look for newweapons.”33 Hedayat’s Eve’s Apple foregrounds the necessity and urgency of looking
31Golshiri, “For They Know What They Do Know.”32Hamid Keshmirshekan, “The Question of Identity vis-à-vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian
Art,” lecture delivered at the Khalili Research Center, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University,during the Barakat Trust Conference: “Contemporary Iranian Art: Modernity and the Iranian Artist,”curated by Hamid Keshmirshekan, Kellogg College, Oxford University, 11 July 2005; Golshiri, “ForThey Know What They Do Know.”
33Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” inNegotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin(New York, 1995), 180.
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for new weapons, for new strategies of resistance, and for new ways to negotiate powerduring the age of highly animate “social machines that create and recreate the identi-ties and differences that are understood as the local,” now marginalized in more subtleand nuanced ways than they were before.34
After her video Untitled (2005), in which we see a close-up of Hedayat staring intothe camera, wearing a loose scarf, which is a common and familiar visual element intoday’s everyday life in Iran, numerous critiques, similar in nature to what Golshiriwrites about Iranian artists, gushed out of the scene of contemporary art in Iran.Her appearance with a scarf was at the center of these critiques. Although there isno written account on Hedayat’s work, at least to the best of my knowledge, beinginvolved with the contemporary art scene in Tehran allowed me to hear clearly theinflux of criticism flowing in the oral discourses of the art scene, both among artistsand critics. Most of these critiques arose from the super-sign of the veil. ThoseIranian critics who lambasted her work did not recognize Hedayat’s appearance inthe veil as the only way she could have shown her work in public, nor could theyimagine that Iranian women really do wear the scarf in their everyday lives. The
Figure 4. Shirin Aliabadi, Miss Hybrid III, 2007 [Inkjet print on plexiglass,150 × 114 cm.], courtesy of the artist.
34Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 45.
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veil, the scarf, was turned merely into a signifier of what we used to call “self-exoticiza-tion” in Iran. For as soon as it appeared in any artistic representation of a female figure,it masked the content of the artwork and made impossible any critical dialog betweenthe artwork and its spectators.It was as a result of this situation that Hedayat decided to move away from a rep-
resentational visibility; a strategy that I will discuss later in this paper. This deliberatemove gave rise to her next video, Eve’s Apple (2006), which until today remains one ofthe least seen and one of the most remarkable video works in the contemporary art ofIran, given its semantic and visual complexity and its potential for resisting dominantnarratives of marginalization of non-Western artists. Eve’s Apple is a seven-minute-long video that is repeated continuously during the time of its exhibition. It is anextreme close-up of a female larynx, a protuberance in the human throat, that everyonce in a while moves slightly up and down, and thus the looping of the videomakes it almost impossible to discern where it starts and ends. The experience ofencountering the video is somewhat disorienting in that the visual qualities of itslow-contrast pale skin color prevent any immediate recognition of what is beingshown on the screen. This visually abstract footage of a female throat, which isshown in a small monitor with a comparable scale to the average human being, isinstalled behind a wall in the gallery at the height of approximately five feet. Thevideo has no sound. The title of the work, Eve’s Apple (“Seeb e Havvā” in Persian),is reminiscent of the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden as aresult of their rebellious act of eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.Eve’s Apple complicates the problematic association of sin with femininity within
the Christian tradition and biblical translations of the story of Adam and Eve. Itstitle suggests that the protuberance in our throats is a constant reminder of our
Figure 5. Ghazaleh Hedayat, Untitled, 2005 [Still from video], courtesy of the artist.
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primordial sin. But at the same time, by changing the famous name of “Adam’s apple”given to the human larynx, it alludes to the historical associations of Eve with sin,inscribed in our minds. Hedayat playfully criticizes the phallocentric biases ofhistory and language. This is one of the instances where she posits her critique tothe politics of translation that have rendered an imaginative story a source of associ-ation of women with deception and disgrace. Emphasizing an arbitrary translation ofthe Latin word malum as apple by including it in the title of her work, she draws ourattention to the very limits of translation. The Latin word malum (evil) is similar tothe word malum (an apple); a similarity that has influenced the apple’s becominginterpreted as the biblical “forbidden fruit.” This arbitrariness as the characteristicof translation leads us to what Derrida brought to our attention; that translationenforces homo-hegemony and ultimately always favors one context over the other.This allusion in the work of Hedayat effectively extends her criticism of the arbitrari-ness in Western reiterations of Adam and Eve’s story that resulted in favor of mascu-linity and held Eve accountable for contracting malum or evil.Yet there are at least two more complex sides to Hedayat’s critique of the binary
logic implemented in Western thought. Perhaps the slight bulge in the throat depictedin Eve’s Apple and its less visible presence resonates with the contrast between genitalorgans, and thus it alludes to the famous envy for what is absent. While it seems per-tinent to read Hedayat’s work through the psychoanalytical notion of penis envy, Isuggest that the similarity between the shape of the protuberance in the depictedthroat and the figure of the breast are not accidental. What Eve’s Apple offers in posit-ing this subtle figural similarity is an inkling of the primacy of motherhood, and there-fore it puts forward a strong dismantling critique of the phallocentric assumptionsembedded in the works of Sigmund Freud, a founding father of modern Westernthought. As two of the most prominent scholars of feminist psychoanalysis,
Figure 6. Ghazaleh Hedayat, Eve’s Apple, 2006 [Still from video], courtesy of theartist.
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Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva, have suggested in their critique of Freud’s biologicalessentialism, the maternal function should be regarded as a force that not only plays asignificant role in the development of the mother’s subjectivity but also allows her toaccept the Other, the child, neither as “an ab-ject … nor an object of desire, but the firstOther.”35 Eve’s Apple’s invocation of the figure of the breast thus strives to foregroundthe primacy of motherhood in order to tease yet another discourse of phallocentrismthat has continuously privileged masculinity and rendered femininity in associationwith absence, lack and a desire for what is “missing.”The notion of the acceptance of the Other emerges also in a different interpretation
of Eve’s Apple enabled by Hélène Cixous’s reading of the fable of Adam and Eve. In“Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman,” indescribing what she calls “the primitive meal [cène] in the primitive scene [scène]” ofAdam and Eve, Cixous argues that the significance of the biblical story lies in thetension between desire and prohibition. She asserts that the apple, as a paradigmaticobject of desire, becomes the site of the struggle between interdiction and desire for thefirst woman. What Cixous finds to be the most compelling in the triumph of desireover prohibition in Eve, which ultimately results in her biting of the apple, the visiblepromise that is “full and possesses an inside,” is that Eve is not afraid of eating it.“What Eve will discover,” she writes, “in her relationship to the concrete reality isthe inside of the apple, and this inside is good. The Fable [of the primordial sin]tells us how the genesis of ‘femininity’ goes by way of the mouth, through a certainoral pleasure, and through the nonfear of the inside.”36
Cixous continues: “astonishingly, our oldest book of dreams relates to us, in itscryptic mode, that Eve in not afraid of the inside, neither of her own nor of theother’s.”37 Cixous’s reading enables us to interpret another dimension of thecomplex work of Hedayat, in that it allows us to understand the absence of abolder protuberance as a higher capacity for the integration of the Other, theoutside. Thus, Eve’s Apple, in reminding us that Eve, as primordial feminine, exercisedher superior potential to open herself to the otherness of the apple, disturbs the mascu-line economy that “is characterized by a single-minded concern with increasing thephallic power of the masculine subject,” according to Cixous.38
Hedayat’s complex and multifaceted video effectively eludes reductive interpret-ations, in that she deliberately removes any familiar signifier of her ethnic backgroundin order to partake in a broader dialog concerning femininity and phallocentrism. Thegradual evolution in her oeuvre is clearly visible in her departure from a video in whichshe appeared in a self-portrait style staring into the camera without blinking to thepoint that her face is wet with tears to her later arrival to another video, where herfigural representation becomes highly abstracted. Moreover, the continuation of this
35Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York, 2001), 154–55.36Hélène Cixous, “The Primitive Meal,” in French Feminists on Religion: A Reader, ed. Morny Joy,
Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon (New York and London, 2002), 222–23.37Cixous, “The Primitive Meal”.38Cixous, “The Primitive Meal,” Editors’ Introduction.
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abstraction in her subsequent work, where she avoids figural representation throughworking with hair and skin, suggests a carefully planned strategy that gains more visi-bility precisely through invisibility.39 This is not to suggest that in order to have morevisible women we need to have more invisible ones, but to understand that the politicsof visibility should be disturbed by means of deployment of strategies that aim at thelimits of its very logic. Hedayat offers a valuable and potent example that strives totarget the limits of visibility and translation.As performance theorist Peggy Phelan has shown us, in the context of the represen-
tation of female subjects, neither “better” representations (i.e., those that are morevisible) nor the refusal of representation (those that are invisible or non-existent)by women can serve as “solutions” to the phallocentric ideologies of representation.40
Thus she proposes the employment of the subversive strategy of the “unmarked,” theinvisible, the non-reproductive or the performative to dismantle the very logic onwhich the ideology of the visible operates. Although Phelan has faced theoretical criti-cism for suggesting that performance eludes re-presentation and remaining, it is usefulto extrapolate from her theory an articulation of resistance against representation thatthrives upon attacking the very logic of representation.41
Resonating with this notion of undoing the logic of a discourse, we can elicit fromGhazaleh Hedayat’s works, among those of numerous other artists’,42 a tactic of resist-ance that targets the limits of the discourse that is originally supposed to delimit anddefine the work itself. Thus, Hedayat’s systematic attack on language and translation,as it is manifest in Eve’s Apple, should be read as an effort to tease out the confinementsof the inter-discursive translation in the contemporary global art market and conse-quently as an attempt to disturb its secure modus operandi.I do not mean to imply that what I am offering here is the only accurate possible
reading of Hedayat’s work. Also, it might appear to be an odd claim to argue that amore nuanced reading of Hedayat’s work will arrive through an interpretationinformed by the work of some central Western thinkers in the discipline of psycho-analysis. However, before providing a response too quickly to this legitimate concern,
39Ghazaleh Hedayat’s show Strand and Skin was held at Tarrahan Azad Art Gallery in Tehran inOctober and November 2008. All works presented at the show followed the same strategy of figuralabstraction that I have discussed in this paper.
40Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London, 1993), 26.41For a prominent example of the criticism Phelan faced, see Rebecca Schneider, “Archives: Perform-
ance Remains,” Performance Research, 6, no. 2 (2000), 100–108.42For example look at Robert Storr’s interview with the artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, where he argues
in favor of abstraction as an effective way in producing political art. He says to Storr, “Let’s look atabstraction, and let’s consider the most successful of those political artists, Helen Frankenthaler. Whyare they the most successful political artists, even more than Kosuth, much more than Hans Haacke,much more than Nancy and Leon or Barbara Kruger? Because they don’t look political! And as weknow it’s all about looking natural, it’s all about being the normative aspect of whatever segment ofculture we’re dealing with, of life. That’s where someone like Frankenthaler is the most politically success-ful artist when it comes to the political agenda that those works entail, because she serves a very clearagenda of the Right.” Felix Gonzales-Torres, “Etre un Espion,” interview by Robert Storr, ArtPress(January 1995): 24–32.
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I would like to make note of two important dimensions of this regimentation ofWestern scholars. First I believe that one should not forget that Klein, Kristeva,Cixous and Phelan are all theorizing from a marginal position in relation to the domi-nant masculine discourses of psychoanalysis. And, second, this discursive marginal pos-ition has fractally developed its very own center and margins. Thus, in that I seeHedayat’s video to be a poignant critique of phallocentrism, I did not want toplace her work in the margins of the margins, as happens often with the artists ofthe non-West when they make a political, social or philosophical commentary thataims at discourses at the center of contemporary thought. I chose to read Eve’sApple employing theories of feminist psychoanalytical thinkers for I did not wantto participate in the marginalization of a critique that is potentially useful in opposingphallocentrism. Moreover, Hedayat’s strategy of abstraction along with the content ofher work, both of which I have examined in this paper, is analogous with one of themajor premises of psychoanalysis, i.e. appearance does not necessarily lay bare what ishidden inside. I also want to emphasize that my attention to psychoanalysis in inter-preting her work is in part informed by the discussions I have had with the artistbefore and during the writing of this paper.43
Yet it is unwise to suggest that this strategy is an ultimate solution without its ownrisks and disadvantages. As much as a non-figural abstraction expands the domains ofinterpretation and resists reductive readings, it can also trigger some radical inferencesthat can possibly place the work back into what it initially aims to resist. In autumn of2008 at a screening of Ghazaleh Hedayat’s work during a speech in an academic venuein Malmö, I happened to witness a bizarre reading that obstinately wanted to under-stand her work as a reference to silenced women of the Middle East, where their lar-ynxes (sound box) are not able to give them voice in their traditional and patriarchalsociety. Although potentially this was a forceful and imaginative interpretation, I wasreally struck by how the viewer extrapolated all those remarks about women of theMiddle East from the biographical information about Ghazaleh Hedayat, and couldnot even imagine that her work is about femininity rather than the plight ofwomen of some specific and “imaginative geography” called the Middle East.Thus, at first, it might appear that the question which should be asked is about the
political efficacy of non-figural abstraction in the context of resisting narratives of mar-ginalization. In fact, my aim in this paper has been to demonstrate the effectiveness ofthis strategy, at least in the context of the oeuvre of Ghazaleh Hedayat, and to arguethat its potentials for resisting reductive interpretations by far exceed its limitations.However, there are at least two points that I find in need of further clarification.First, this strategy cannot be disentangled from the context of the work and prescribedto the rest of the artists who fight the same battle against marginalization, in that anyform of prescriptive strategy will sooner or later turn into its opposite and will become
43I have conducted three conversations with the artist, of which two took place in Tehran in summer2009 and the other was a long-distance phone conversation in summer 2010. References to these con-versations are as follows: Ghazaleh Hedayat in three interviews with Foad Torshizi (Tehran, 29 June2009; Tehran, 18 July 2009; Minneapolis-Tehran, 16 June 2010).
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a means of reinforcement of restraints on artists. And, second, one should question theways in which political efficacy of a strategy is assessed and ask whether its subversive-ness has to be merely understood in terms of dismantling a dominant narrative or anauthoritative system of translation and interpretation or if it can be simply successfulin revealing the structures of power relations.In an essay entitled “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power
throughBedouinWomen,”LilaAbu-Lughod suggests thatwhatwe can extrapolate fromvarious forms of resistance is a diagnostic of power relations. She asserts that instead oftaking these forms as signs of human freedom,weneed to see them as strategies that tell usmore about formations of power and how people are caught up in them.44 GhazalehHedayat’sEve’s Apple and her non-figural abstraction strategy offer productive potentialsto see that the artists of the non-West still need to resist their renditions as ethnic Othersand their imposed pastness through reductive readings of their works. It might be thather biographical information, which, unfortunately, has given an instrumental role inthe interpretation of art in art-historical discourses, incites the desire in its viewer toassociate her work with the outside culture, but her video ultimately strives to eludethat kind of capture. Whether it is successful or not, it allows us to deduce the powerrelations which it arduously struggles to resist. By aiming at the very limits of inter-dis-cursive translation and its politics,Hedayat offers an acerbic critique that questions dom-inance, hegemony, and marginalization: questions to which we might never findsatisfactory answers, but that are still in need of iteration.
44Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power throughBedouin Women,” American Ethnologist, 17, no. 1 (February 1990): 54.
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