2021-2024
Portraits of Exile in Persian Literary Tradition
Portraits of Exile in Persian Literary Tradition is a book that Fatemeh Shams had been thinking about for the better part of a decade. In her first book, A Revolution in Rhyme: Official Poets of the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020), she treats the relationship between literature, ideology, and nation-building in Iran with particular focus on the past forty years. Her focus was on the state-sponsored poets and their role in the production of ‘state-sponsored literature.’ The poets who were ‘included’ in the circle of power and were considered as an ‘insider’ (khodi) were the subject matter this work. Her second book project builds up on her first book by focusing on the alternate crowd, those writers who have not been part of the state ideological apparatus for various reasons. Those who have experienced an existence in void through a forceful banishment from their homeland exile and ways in which this experience has been echoed in their creative work. Shams will trace and analyze representations of exilic life in works of major Iranian exiled poets of the 1980s and ‘90s. The notions of ‘symbolic geography’ and ‘liminality’ in the works of these Iranian writers will be therefore among the key concepts that she aims at exploring.
2019-2021
Blurring Borders and Boundaries: Liminal Spaces in Modern Persian Poetry of Iran and Afghanistan
Globalization increasingly favors lateral and nonhierarchical network structures, or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a rhizome. The figure of the rhizome suggests an uncontainable, invisible symbolic geography of relations that become the creative terrain on which minority subjects act and interact in fruitful, lateral ways. My project tackles the symbolic geography and ways in which it shapes the theme of home and homeland in the works of modernist poets of Iran and Afghanistan. By tracing hybrid spatiality in their work, this project aims to demonstrate how poets of Modern Iran and Afghanistan have blurred ideological and geographical boundaries of homeland and national identities through introducing a set of hybrid, invisible symbolic geography based on issues such as gender, sexuality, social justice, and anti-war sentiments. It proposes a recalibration of modern Persian poetics through a cartographical framework, exploring the themes of “home” and “exile” in the works of pioneering poets of Iran and Afghanistan.
