Iranian Cosmopolitanism

Golbarg Rekabtalaei is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern history at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto in 2015. She is interested in the relationships between cinematic image and space, modernity, cosmopolitanism, urbanisation, nationalism, and revolutions. Her research specifically focuses on the role of cinema, in concrete form and onscreen, in facilitating cosmopolitan imaginations and hybrid subjectivities in early twentieth-century Tehran. Rekabtalaei was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at North Carolina State University from 2015 to 2017.

'This book is a very important addition to social and cultural history of twentieth-century Iran that takes cinema as its prism of understanding Iranian modernity. Golbarg Rekabtalaei does a wonderful job of contextualising the experience of cinema not just through films but also across spaces of movie theatres, schools, and other urban public venues. She carefully analyses the State's cultural policies through the exchanges that take place within the sites of experience and encounter of the public with cinema and in response to it. The book, therefore, offers a fresh and original case study on emerging modern cosmopolitanism in the Iranian context.' Ali Mirsepassi, New York University

• Introduction; 1. Cinematic imaginaries and cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century; 2. Cinematic education, cinematic sovereignty: the creation of a cosmo-national cinema; 3. Industrial professionalisation: the emergence of a 'national' commercial cinema; 4. 'Film-Farsi': everyday constituencies of a cosmopolitan popular cinema; 5. Cinematic revolution: cosmopolitan alter-cinema of pre-revolutionary Iran; Conclusion.