Description
This paper discusses how some Iranian nationalist narratives, moved by the fantasy of overcoming Iran’s traumatic past and regaining its ancient superiority, reproduced racialized worldviews through the erasure of slavery’s legacy and non-Persian subjects in the country after the 1979 revolution, such as Azeris and Afro-Iranians. I suggest that racial ideals, like those related to Aryan myths, became entangled with phantasmatic narratives to which the post-revolutionary Iranian regime was and still is affectively and libidinally attached. Anti-imperialist discourses accuse and work against Western imperial and colonial oppressions and discriminations but simultaneously maintain racialized hierarchies in Iran. In this sense, psychoanalytic discourse analysis is employed to discuss imaginaries and national self-consciousnesses built from the ideas of gharbzadegi (Westoxification, Occidentosis) and cultural schizophrenia. By employing the Lacanian concepts of fantasy and enjoyment, this paper aims to contribute to a growing literature on the psychic attachments to nationalism and racism and to mobilize discussions of race and racialization in non-Western contexts, considering the effects of colonialism and imperialism in Iran.
Keywords: Iran, anti-imperialism, psychoanalysis, race, Lacan.
