Brown Bag Lecture Series: From Cultural Assault to Cultural Exchange: The Critical Reception of Hollywood in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Soon after the Iranian revolution of 1979, both the US and Iran governments banned the distribution and exhibition of American films in Iran. The film industries in the two countries, however, used the political tensions as the subject matter of several products. This talk focuses on the reception of those American films in Iran which directly touched upon the causes and effects of the mutual enmity between the two states. Adopting a historical approach to transnational media studies and investigating a variety of Persian and English news items and critical pieces, this lecture analyzes a track initiated by Brian Gilbert’s Not Without My Daughter (1990) and peaked by Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012). Examining official, underground, and diasporic responses of Iranian audiences to these cinematic adaptations of literary works exemplifies how the meanings of cultural products are constructed and construed against the backdrop of local and global sociopolitical contexts.
Sponsored by: the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies