"The Discriminatory Discourses of Self-Sacrifice: State and Dissident Martyrs in Post-Revolutionary Iran" by Shahla Talebi

Shahla Talebi

Deposited 2007

Abstract
This dissertation, "The Discriminatory Discourses of Self-sacrifice: The State and the Dissident Martyrs in Post-revolutionary Iran," examines the sociopolitical, cultural, and religious transfigurations of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in recent Iranian history. It comparatively explores the discourses and praxes of self-sacrifice among the families of two distinct groups: those killed in the Iran-Iraq War, or "state martyrs," and those executed by the state, or "dissident martyrs." I explore the ways in which shared cultural and linguistic referents, collective memories, and embodied practices have shaped, and been shaped by, the discourse of self-sacrifice. I also demonstrate how manipulations of these collective referents, particularly those which concern martyrdom, have been critical to the formation and the contestation of hegemonic discourses in contemporary Iran. This dissertation introduces a new conceptualization of these particular metaphors and of their relationship to the Revolution and to post-revolutionary Iran. I use the terms "metaphoric discourses" and "discursive metaphors" to imply and encompass the complexity, resilience, and in-flexibility of specific memories and metaphors in Iranian society and in the 1979 Revolution. By "metaphoric discourses," I refer to those discourses that come to stand for something else, either linguistically or conceptually. While I reckon the metaphoric quality of all discourses, I consider the Karbala narrative a particular metaphoric discourse that has at once enabled and curtailed contemporary Iranian sociopolitical discourses and languages. I also venture to suggest the term "discursive metaphor" to delineate those kinds of metaphors that, as in Talal Asad's notion of discursive tradition, are demarcated by and bounded to a core set of simultaneously continuous yet transforming and transformative stories and beliefs. The dialectic of this continuity and contingency and the apparently immutable yet historically living discursive metaphors is exemplified in their elastic embodiment in social practices and institutions and their manifestation in everyday life of the subjects of this research. I propose that shabih khāni (the religious reenactment of the Karbala Event) is a pertinent example of such a discursive metaphor. To illuminate these dynamics, I trace the epitomes and effects of the state-produced discourse of martyrdom in such sites as cemeteries, museums of war and martyrdom, the media, jokes, dreams, and bodily practices. I argue that particular collective memories, linguistic and conceptual metaphors, and religious, cultural, and literary symbols, have been, and continue to be, indispensable to the history of dominant power in modern Iran. I also show that these elements are, at the same time, the very means with which to transgress hegemonic discourses. This dissertation accompanies people in and out of the labyrinth of their dreams, struggles, and disappointments and making history.