UC Berkeley

Disordering Modernism: The Aesthetics of Affliction in Post-Coup Iran examines the psychic, temporal, and aesthetic forms of disorder in Iranian modernism in the wake of the British- and American-imposed coup d’état of 1953. Analyzing both the historical conditions of external colonialism (este’mār) and internal despotism (estebdād), this dissertation conducts a medium-specific analysis of Iranian modernist forms to consider the ways in which aesthetic works register psychic affliction and provide a critical way of reconfiguring the world in the wake of violence. Bringing together major visual artists (Bahman Mohasses, Bahman Farmanara, Nasser Taqvai) and fiction writers (Gholam Hossein Saedi, Bahram Sadeqi, Simin Daneshvar), this dissertation offers a new study of the relationship between violence and representation.

Each chapter traces the experience of affliction not only as a symptom of the historical conditions of uncertainty and paranoia imposed by the coup but also as an event that unsettles the psychic and historic grounds of experience, generating a channel to the untimely, uncanny, and otherworldly. As part of the experience of affliction, the artists I write about consider abstraction both as a violent technique of the state and as a multi-temporal dislocating force that enables their work to generate a critique of multiple regimes of power, past, present, and future. By attending to the aesthetic form of affliction, Disordering Modernism addresses the gap within research on semi-colonial histories in postcolonial studies, while also using a comparative study of media to construct a narrative of global modernity across transhistorical and transnational planes.