Suffering for/against the nation: Gharbzadegi and the tensions of anticolonialism in Iran

Abstract

What accounts for the nation’s persistence as a central object of identification in anticolonial movements during the 1960s? How can we understand the appeal of nationalism when it simultaneously could signify one path to and a pitfall of decolonisation, as Frantz Fanon warned? This article addresses some of these questions concerning anticolonialism, its political possibilities, decolonial fantasies and desires in Iran. I discuss how Jalal Al-e Ahmad articulated a diagnosis of cultural imperialism, gharbzadegi, that expressed tensions between the translocality to which his framework aspired and the rigid confines of the nation-state model. This imbroglio, I claim, reverberated through the pathologisation of the national group, with the wounds of colonial violence unsettling and reforming different national attachments in Iran. To support this argument, I read the specific conditions, dynamics and sociohistorical processes in which Al-e Ahmad was immersed alongside the transnational structures to which they were related. Juxtaposing this pathological discourse with his travelogues, we can grasp a specific articulation of the translocal-national dyad that informed Al-e Ahmad’s life and found expression in his limited theorisation of gharbzadegi. Analysing this particular context, I argue that this entanglement exposes the limits and pitfalls of anticolonialism in Iran.