Warring Souls

                  Larkin’s book is a great example of how media as a technology means contributing to the modern development process in Kano, Nigeria, from colonial to post-colonial periods. Since the book is about a Muslim area, it reminded me all the stories I have heard or read about coming media (especially television) to Iran as a Muslim society. How hard it was for Reza Shah who was trying to bring technology to Iran to establish a modern country.

            Studying Iran’s movie industry by itself could be a great way to follow how Iranian modern culture shaped in the last eight decades. During Pahlavi dynasty, media was promoting modern/American culture (even domestic productions). Later on, independent cinema moved forward to implicate some intellectual thoughts that sometimes contain some revolutionary ideas, especially last decade before the revolution, and at that point censorship from government started in Iran’s film industry and continued to this day.

            Right after revolution Iran got involved in a war with Iraq. This is a time the murals of martyrs and revolutionary leaders that had risen during revolution period, growth in Iran more significantly. Roxanne Varzi’s “Warring Souls” is an attempt to probe beyond the exotic allure of these murals to apprehend the post-revolutionary production of a “culture of martyrdom” in Iran. Varzi argues that after the revolution, and particularly during the 1980-1988 war against Iraq, the Islamic republic benefited from media, using murals, memoirs, fiction, documentaries, and feature films to create “Islamic Subjects” out of a younger generation of Iranians.

            The first half of the book provides an analysis of the visual representations of war, martyrdom, and Islam in Iran and second half engages in a discussion of the simultaneous segregation and merging of public and private spaces. Varzi describes the social imaginaries and habits that come out of the polarization of public and private.

Varzi, Roxanne. 2006. Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran. Durham and London: Duke University Press.