Abstract

What can a performance of death do? In By an Eye-Witness (2013), conceptual artist Azadeh Akhlaghi restaged the deaths of iconic 20th-century Iranian reformists and revolutionaries before a camera, infusing the tales of her subjects’ deaths with narrative doubt. With its microhistorical approach, the photographic reconstructions offer insight into how we might bridge narrative gaps in lieu of erasing them. Paradoxically patching the archive by puncturing it anew with even more ambiguity, the series posits history as a memory always constructed as such and shows how changing the archive amounts to changing the future. 

In this talk, I present By an Eye-Witness as an instance of what I theorize as “performances of death” (PoD): a framework through which one Iranian generation knows itself and is known to others. Central to my current book project are the media and artistic productions and quotidian and ritual practices of the “war generation,” born in the immediate lead up to the revolution (1978–79) and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). My work argues that PoD, hypervisual performances that materialize around death and its commemoration—or lack thereof—enable an interrogation of how commemorative practices shape the war generation’s sociopolitical agency. I illustrate how for the war generation, PoD facilitate the circulation of counter-moods and counter-narratives that resist the dominant storytelling techniques of the state by interrogating the state’s official archives, taking back public spaces, and building out popular culture using the structure of the same commemorative rituals the state has long used to propagate its ideological power

Bio

Sareh Z Afshar (she/او) is a writer, translator, scholar, and storyteller. Currently an Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, she is a graduate of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University (PhD 2021, MPhil 2020, MA 2011). She also holds an MA in communication and MS in learning technologies and media systems. Her research and teaching interests reside at the intersection of performance and politics, with an emphasis on the politics of representation, materiality of visuality, aesthetics of everyday life, minoritarian memory and trauma studies, collective movements and new/digital media ecologies, and transnational queer feminist praxis. Prior to joining Princeton, she served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. 

At Princeton, she is working on her monograph, “Authority and Ambiguity: Performances of Death and Power in Postrevolutionary Iran,” which theorizes what she calls “performances of death” (PoD) as a framework through which one Iranian generation knows itself and is known to others. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in TDR: The Drama Review, e-misférica, TPQ: Text & Performance Quarterly, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Futures, Khayyam, Ravagh, and edited book volumes. She has taught courses at NYU, Brown, Purdue, and Montclair State University, and served as managing editor to e-misféricaand Ravagh and assistant editor to TDR. She has lost two cities—lovely ones, Montréal and Tehran—but deems the East Coast a soothing corner for contemplating the balance between being too foreign for home and too foreign for here. Together with Narges Bajoghli, she is co-creator/editor of Feminist Futures, a multilingual, multimedia platform they dreamt up and realized through the Rethinking Iran Initiative at Johns Hopkins University.