The Production Of Iran As National State Space: An Historical Geography

In existing literature, ‘Iran’ is often represented as a pre-existing and unified (Persian) nation, enclosed in a perennial national territory and history. I argue that this conception of ‘Iran’ is rooted in dominant (internalist and ahistorical) conceptions of space as static, pregiven, and passive, and time as monorhythmic and linear. ‘Iran’ is thus largely understood – even in critical analyses of Iranian nationalism – as a pregiven entity external to its constituent elements including Farsi and the ‘spatiotemporal matrices’ of capitalist nation state. This dissertation examines scholarly and other forms of literature, as well as the social practices, that have contributed to the production of Iranian-ness in both popular and scholarly consciousness. I argue that ‘Iran’ did not exist prior and/or external to the historical formation of ‘Iranian nation’. Iran as a national state space has been made possible through a set of very recent political, scientific, infrastructural, and technological processes in the imperialist and colonial context of late development and formal subsumption of labour under capital. My core research question, therefore, is: how has Iran been produced as a national state space within this context? To address this, I critically examine the historiographic, Farsist, and cartographic practices of the state as fundamental mechanisms in the production of Iran. These tripartite practices of the state have resulted in an entrenched Irancentric philosophy of (geo)history translated into the commonsensical Farsist worldview of ‘Iranians’. This has negatively impacted the formation of a progressive political strategy of change. It is then strategically imperative to articulate a radical geohistory of Iran as a multiscalar and multitemporal entity rooted in the everyday lives of the subaltern subjects. My dissertation is an initial step in mapping such a geohistory that highlights the contingent, positively heterogeneous, and open-ended nature of geohistory and spacetime in general, and of the nation state and Iran in particular.