The Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies

The Eighth Biennial Conference of the International Society for IranianStudies (ISIS), the largest international gathering of scholars in the field, washeld in Santa Monica, CA, on 27-30 May 2010. There were sixty-four panels,each with three to four presenters addressing topics ranging from literature,Shi`ism and Sufism, to modernity, politics, women and gender. Amongthe ones that I found most interesting were “Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran,”“Engagements with Reason: Shi`ism and Iran’s Intellectual Culture,” “PersianLiterary and Cinematic Representations of a Society in Transition,”“Shi’i Modernity, Constitutionalism, Elections, and Factional Politics,”“Reconstructing the Forgotten Female: Women in the Realm of the Shahnama,”“Zones of Exploration: Society, Literature, and Film,” “Re-ReadingIranian Shi`ism: International and Transnational Connections and Influence,”“The Politics of the Possible in Iran,” “Women’s Issues in ModernIran (in Persian),” “Discourses on Self And Other,” and “Sufism: Poetry andPractice.”Also featured were classical Persian music presentations and additionalroundtable discussions. One telling example of often overlooked aspects ofIranian society was “‘Waking Up the Colours: Candour and Allegory inWomen’s Rap Texts,” a paper on Iranian women’s rap music. Presenter GaiBray, an ethnomusicologist, argued that unlike the common conception ofrap as direct language, Iranian female rappers often use allegory to deal withdifficult subject matters, such as rape and prostitution. In another memorablepaper Babak Rahimi (University of California, San Diego) argued thatBushehr’s commemoration of Ashura serves to solidify communal identity.The ritual ends by burning the stage upon which the performances tookplace, signifying a communal act of creative destruction through which newidentities are reconstructed via building new ritual sites

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