Suffering for/against the nation: Gharbzadegi and the tensions of anticolonialism in Iran

Abstract

What accounts for the nation’s persistence as a central object of identification in anticolonial movements during the 1960s? How can we understand the appeal of nationalism when it simultaneously could signify one path to and a pitfall of decolonisation, as Frantz Fanon warned? This article addresses some of these questions concerning anticolonialism, its political possibilities, decolonial fantasies and desires in Iran. I discuss how Jalal Al-e Ahmad articulated a diagnosis of cultural imperialism, gharbzadegi, that expressed tensions between the translocality to which his framework aspired and the rigid confines of the nation-state model. This imbroglio, I claim, reverberated through the pathologisation of the national group, with the wounds of colonial violence unsettling and reforming different national attachments in Iran. To support this argument, I read the specific conditions, dynamics and sociohistorical processes in which Al-e Ahmad was immersed alongside the transnational structures to which they were related. Juxtaposing this pathological discourse with his travelogues, we can grasp a specific articulation of the translocal-national dyad that informed Al-e Ahmad’s life and found expression in his limited theorisation of gharbzadegi. Analysing this particular context, I argue that this entanglement exposes the limits and pitfalls of anticolonialism in Iran.

Souffrir pour/contre la nation : gharbzadegi et les tensions de l’anticolonialisme en Iran

Introduction

This article discusses Iran’s position in the Third World project through an engagement with Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential activist in the 1960s and 1970s whose discourses are frequently made responsible for the boiling context of 1978–79 and the Islamic Republic’s founding, a widely contested claim. ¹ He contributed to the resurgent wave that put Islam back at the centre stage of Iranian politics, articulating a distinct view on the complexity and dynamism of what should be Iran. Al-e Ahmad critiqued the deeply felt humiliation Iranians had to bear when caged in the violent hierarchies and dichotomies Western modernity imposed upon them, a criticism most remarkably expressed in his conceptual framework of gharbzadegi. Here, I mobilise his discourses to discuss how they articulated an anticolonial imaginary centred on the fantasy of an Iranian nation and how they entailed psycho-affective mechanisms of resentment, pain and hope.

The main issue I investigate here is why the nation-state persists as a central object of identification even in contexts where its Eurocentrism is put into question, as during decolonisation and national liberation struggles in Third World countries in the 1960s. By situating myself in Iran, I aim to join an emerging scene of anticolonial intellectuals who proposed decolonial futures to change their oppressive status under the authoritarian and Western-looking Pahlavi monarchy. Constrained by the neocolonial predicaments of Westernising modernisation and Soviet communism, they imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, although Jalal Al-e Ahmad was one who questioned the necessity and desirability of Euro-American modernity in Iran, the nation remained central to his alternative vision, trapped in a national teleology even as he reworked it towards a questioning of coloniality. I try to explain this by going under the veil of discourse and reaching out to affects as means of understanding this pervasiveness of nationalism as a modern feature of identification processes in global politics, concentrating on the role of pain in the construction of Iran as an injured, sick nation by Al-e Ahmad.

It is my contention that gharbzadegi and how it has been employed in Iran present tensions located within anticolonialism, representing a dynamic in which forces that aspire to go beyond the nation become entangled with those that constrain it in the borders and limits of this same model. In this nexus, the experience of pain manifests the rearticulation of psycho-affective attachments to nationalism, indicative of the national liberation project’s pathologisation. I read the specific conditions, dynamics and sociohistorical processes in which Al-e Ahmad was immersed alongside the translocal, transnational structures to which they were related. As the primary theoretical source, Frantz Fanon is not considered a passive means through which I could advance my discussion but an actual actor who contributes to constructing realities through theorising Iranian anticolonial nationalism.

As an ongoing narrative of encounters, tensions and entanglements, this article is organised in a way that I hope provides an empirical exploration of the national-transnational/translocal dyad as expressed in a particular context of anticolonialism in Iran. I first explore the transnational context of the global 1960s as instantiated in Iran, positioning Jalal Al-e Ahmad within it. The following section situates the discussion in the literature on anticolonial nationalism, its limits and possibilities. I then explain the details of my theoretical framework by engaging with Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical theorisation of nationalism and national consciousness. Finally, I proceed to the discourse analysis of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s most important and influential book, Gharbzadegi [Occidentosis, Westoxification] and the affective politics it mobilised concerning Iranian anticolonial nationalism. ² Focusing on the political and emotional work imbued in figures of speech like metaphors and analogies, this article reads it alongside the translocal network promoted in other instances of Al-e Ahmad’s thought, particularly his travelogues and the unfinished project of the Four Kaabas.

Tuning to the rhythms of revolution: The global 1960s in Iran

With the ousting of the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, a popular and charismatic leader, from power by American and British hands in 1953, a deep-seated feeling of national shame found place amongst Iranians. ³ Displacement, disavowal and self-loathing about their own cultural-historical experiences, strongly present in Iranian society since it began its series of encounters with Europeans and their modernist knowledge, magnified a heightened sense of impotence towards these imperialist foreign powers. ⁴ In reaction to this boiling environment, a growing intellectual opposition broadly identified with the Left moved against the ruling Pahlavi dynasty and its attempt at strictly connecting Iranian national identity to the monarchy. In the context of emerging Third Worldist discourses, some of these movements endeavoured to adapt them to Iran’s sociopolitical landscape. Fanon’s latest book, The Wretched of the Earth, struck a chord among these Iranian intellectuals.

The changing temperature in the 1960s and 1970s could be felt in the Iranian intellectual milieu through the arrival, to widespread acclaim and under the watchful eyes of the Pahlavi regime, of Fanon’s oeuvre in Iran. Fanon found a perfect audience for his revolutionary message through the voice and hands of Ali Shariati, who consistently engaged with him through correspondence, referenced his books in writing, and, to much confusion and historical inaccuracy, is popularly and mistakenly deemed to be the first translator of The Wretched of the Earth. ⁵ While perhaps the most committed exponent of anticolonial thought in Iran, Shariati was not responsible for single-handedly popularising and disseminating it.

According to Hamid Dabashi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad was a ‘kindred soul of Fanon’. However, there is no evidence of the authors’ relationship, and the former’s work did not engage in any extensive fashion with the latter’s, despite the category of coloniality bearing on the development of gharbzadegi. ⁶ But, more than the result of individual endeavours, though these were essential for its success, ⁷ Fanon’s reception by Iranian society was symptomatic of the growing anti-imperialist opposition against the Shah. Curiously yet also significantly, Fanon disagreed with Shariati exactly on what would turn out to be a crucial point in the revolutionary process of 1978/79: the role of religion in national liberation struggles, a discussion Shariati, Al-e Ahmad and most of Iran were submerged in at the time which anticipated that movement. ⁸

Despite Iran never being formally colonised, the struggle against the Shah appealed to a sense of loss and misdirection articulated in intellectual discourses attentive to the problem of cultural alienation, a malaise whose primary pathogen was defined as the West. This demonic entity constituted the source of most corrupting practices reproduced in Iran and gradually became more identified as ‘the Great Satan’ (the US). Against it, Al-e Ahmad promoted an alternative consciousness whose aim was to re-establish Iranian national culture, what many understood as an appeal for ‘cultural authenticity’. For Ali Mirsepassi, ‘the discourse of authenticity emerges as a dialogic mode of reconciling local cultures with modernity’, but I would say, following Sajed, that this framing presupposes a national teleology as the unavoidable path for modernity, even if it is rethought by postcolonial nations, as it is the case with Iran. ⁹ More than a signal to the past, this call resonated with the political movement this Iranian, ‘Third Worldist intellectual’ ¹⁰ was advancing and reflected his position in a central dialogue among intellectuals and activists in the Third World, that of cultural imperialism. ¹¹ Thus, the Third World project arrived in Iran through a cultural struggle that related sideways to cries echoed by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, with the crucial difference that these Iranian imaginaries often committed to distinct degrees to Islamic and Shi’i symbology and spirituality.

Framing Iranians as part of the Third World and, therefore, as subjects traversed by colonial violence and alienation entailed setting their experiences alongside those lived by Algerians, Vietnamese, Palestinians and other colonised peoples. This effort was shared by secular and religious intellectuals, activists, women, students and guerrilla fighters, who considered translocal connections as an inevitable part of their reclaiming of national culture. Contrary to the parochial interpretation that summarises Al-e Ahmad’s work as a nativist ‘return to the past’, ¹² he and other intellectuals, such as Ali Shariati, immersed their projects into a transnational ideological network which followed and reproduced Fanon’s call for ‘self-awareness’ in their revolutionary upbringing. For the latter, ‘[s]elf-awareness does not mean closing the door on communication’, as ‘[i]t is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives’. ¹³ This entanglement between the national and the international/transnational/translocal was a site of substantive ideological and political engagement and contention, exposing the nation’s fluidity as warring parties struggled to define it and/or keep it open-ended.

Contributing to mobilising a Third Worldist Iran, Iranians built a multi-sited offensive against the dominating predicament that conditioned their trajectory to be based around experiences from Europe and the United States or the Soviet Union. Early signs of the translocal connectivities to be articulated in this process appeared in the 1950s with Khalil Maleki, who advanced a sophisticated political practice of non-alignment by forming the Third Force (Niru-ye Sevvom). His alternative encompassed those countries that ‘neither feel free in Mr Truman’s free world nor do they see any sign of socialism in the Soviet Union’s socialist camp. These masses of people in Asia, Europe, Africa and elsewhere wish to cooperate with each other and protect their own national and social character and identity’. ¹⁴ Maleki’s politics and theorisation of non-alignment somewhat anticipated what would be known as the Third World and, for Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, ‘acted as an essential precondition of Al-e Ahmad’s formulation of gharbzadegi’. ¹⁵

In the 1960s, members of the Organisations of the National Front of Iran Abroad picked up the torch set ablaze by Maleki and started to send willing individuals to Algeria, Egypt and Palestine in a solidarity and training effort aimed at national liberation, revolution and emancipation in the Third World, where Iran was included. ¹⁶ Student activism directly engaged with this global anticolonial atmosphere, as ‘Iranian students could not imagine any form of protest in the late 1960s but ones that looked like and linked to a global mold, evoking faraway places like Palestine and Vietnam to legitimate their demands’. ¹⁷ With the conferences of Bandung (1955), Belgrade (1961) and Havana (1966) mobilising imaginative, ideological and political resources shared among Iranians, Arabs, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans, the anti-Shah opposition was integrated into the Third World project, whose translocal dimension had a significant bearing on Jalal Al-e Ahmad. ¹⁸

The leftist Iranian intellectual circles held Al-e Ahmad as a critical figure who appropriately exposed and developed the discussions on cultural imperialism, Western modernity and national culture they were advancing at the time. He often showcased a highly conspiratorial discourse in tune with these intellectuals’ general tendency to blame all issues on the West or the USSR. However, this does not erase the fact that gharbzadegi diagnosed the psycho-affective violence of coloniality as a transversal condition located at the core of the identification and subjectification processes of the colonised. To reach this conclusion, Al-e Ahmad recognised the emotional experience of pain as a bonding factor in the restructuring of the Iranian nation and as a resource to be identified and reworked by and in other liberation movements in the Third World. Though Al-e Ahmad never got rid of nationalism, something visible in gharbzadegi’s gender and class economies, he expanded it by setting his framework in a global anticolonial structure. In his critique against Westernised development, he reverberated calls from Latin American dependency theory. In his tenuous search for national liberation in Islam, he took part in an active thread of Islamic anticolonialism and anti-Western sentiment of the likes of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who greatly inspired Iranian intelligentsia during the 1960s, Muhammad Iqbal, Hasan Al-Banna and Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi. ¹⁹

Besides this ideological dimension, this dynamic intellectual exchange assumed materiality through Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s travels and travelogues, in which he articulated and performed his translocality despite simultaneously exposing its limits and pitfalls. The pinnacle of his unfinished work, the Four Kaabas, which I shall discuss later, represented this underlying yet repressed global aspiration, which the overarching and undifferentiated pathological condition of gharbzadegi could not encapsulate. Therefore, Jalal Al-e Ahmad became a leading voice in articulating revolutionary, anticolonial and Third Worldist currents in Iran by helping to set it in a translocal context of multiple oppressions and resistance movements. Still, a deep attachment to the nation lingered and reproduced class and gender hierarchies through his discourse, revealing its limits and exposing global structural constraints that directed him towards the nation-state as his primary node of identification, a process about which Fanon had plenty to say.

To love and hate the nation as the path to decolonisation

Nation-building processes in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America advanced through a strenuous relationship with European colonial projects’ social, political, cultural, and economic legacies, which conditioned the decolonisation and integration of these newly formed countries into the international arena. When talking about anticolonial struggles that happened in the second half of the 20th century and ended up forming new independent political actors in Africa and Asia, there is the sense that most of them failed in accomplishing what their leaders were promising. ²⁰ For David Scott, this is symptomatic of what he calls a ‘problem-space’, meaning a ‘discursive context’ that ‘oblige[s] us to frame the criticism of the present in terms of the strategic value of responding – or evading response – to the conventions of the language-game we find ourselves participants in’. ²¹ Regarding Iran, this can be seen in Iranian historiography’s trend of framing the 1978/79 revolution in terms of failures and successes, usually attributing the first to leftist secular groups and the second to Islamist forces. ²² By calling it the ‘tragedy of the Iranian Left’, we evade addressing the actual possibilities posed to such segments in the revolutionary process and their afterlives experienced in the resistance movements opposed to the current regime. ²³

In International Relations, by setting the anticolonial moment as a failure, the question ‘why this happened?’ is rarely invoked without being alongside a discussion of the perks, perils and appeals of nationalism. Anticolonial nationalism represents a difficult conundrum for thinking about the possibilities of a post-national or alternative order that displaces the nation-state as the centre of politics and gets rid of its constitutive colonial violence. As it reflects movements, groups and figures in the Third World that embraced its ideological premises to engage with decolonisation, this specific nationalist form deals with the paradox of being trapped within post-Enlightenment categories of modernity and development while also building a corpus of critique and praxis that moves against these same colonial structures. ²⁴

Many anticolonial struggles related to Third Worldism invested in the equation of decolonisation with national liberation, even as they articulated imaginations that did not necessarily rely solely on an independent nation-state being formed. Gary Wilder argues that ‘to presuppose that national independence is the necessary form of colonial emancipation is to mistake a product of decolonisation for an optic through which to study it’, claiming the need to recognise some anticolonial theorists, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, as purveyors of challenges to this mode of methodological nationalism. ²⁵ Similarly, David Scott says that the assumption is as if ‘anticolonial nationalists merely had bad (i.e., essentialist or metaphysical) answers [nationalism] to good […] questions [decolonisation]’. ²⁶ In this framing, the failures of anticolonial movements reside in their leaders ‘opting’ for nationalism, a Eurocentric ideological formation, as a way of getting rid of colonial domination, although there weren’t many other courses of action to choose from. ²⁷

Alina Sajed and Timothy Seidel question whether it wouldn’t be more productive to consider the possibility of ‘escaping the nation’ to address the pitfalls nationalism brings to decolonisation. ²⁸ They reflect upon what Fanon had written on national consciousness, which should serve as a means for decolonising but not as an end, since ‘if nationalism is not explained, enriched and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end’, a familiar predicament for postcolonial states. For Fanon, only the ‘collective consciousness in motion of the entire people’ provides the anticolonial struggle with the living force necessary to turn the nation into a greater process of sociopolitical change that disposes of the dangers of confiding the conduction of the decolonial project to bourgeois elites working as agents of domination. ²⁹ This relates to a dislocation of anticolonial nationalism from a fundamental nexus with national independence to a ‘wholesale transformation of the colonised and a reconstitution of the international order’, a radical, revolutionary project of worldmaking. ³⁰ The paradox of anticolonial nationalism, as part and parcel of a modernist teleology and simultaneously its reformulation from different bases, ³¹ incites an opening to be taken and reworked towards ‘a more sustainable intellectual foundation to anticolonialism’, national consciousness. ³²

For Fanon, national consciousness is intimately connected to international forces, a provocation that inevitably leads to reflections on Third Worldism. ³³ As Vijay Prashad notes, ‘[t]he Third World was not a place’ but ‘a project’, a project that consumed its constituents with dreams, fantasies and imaginaries of a different, more equal world order and turned on itself by murdering groups that disagreed with those that came into power after the liberation struggle, as the Algerian War and Iranian revolution exemplify. ³⁴ Sajed argues that ‘the emergence of the Third Worldist project should be understood then within a translocal space of anticolonial connectivity that went beyond (strictly understood) national boundaries and linked together people and ideas across the world’. ³⁵ Resisting and fighting against the interpellation of the imperial metropolis, ‘a global infrastructure of anticolonial connectivity’ built upon ‘a relationality that exists underneath the wounds of coloniality’ emerges, according to Robbie Shilliam. ³⁶

Anticolonial connectivity was the focus of a special issue organised by Sajed and Seidel, in which they questioned the content and scope of the connections that took shape through and formed politics of solidarity among anticolonial and postcolonial groups and peoples in the Third World. They concur that ‘[a]nticolonial mobilization, thinking and struggle has been intrinsically translocal, transnational and internationalist because alongside the mobilization came also the awareness that colonial rule can only be defeated through solidarity with other colonial spaces and struggles’. ³⁷ Going beyond sociopolitical, economic and cultural networks of anticolonial knowledge, these linkages transpired even by entangling subjects throughout their spiritualities, religions and cosmologies, ‘transcending the material’, as with the trajectory of anticolonial resistance built upon Islam and the ummah. ³⁸ In recounting their stories, struggles, failures and successes, we attempt to grapple with our own postcolonial present, in which legacies and afterlives of anticolonial connectivity are often forgotten and replaced by a unilateral relationship with the Global North.

Once in power, anticolonial groups, as much progressive and emancipatory an imagination they had articulated, had their hopes curtailed by the conditions and dominating structures they previously tried to dismantle. Though bleak, this reality of pervasive colonialism and imperial violence does not indicate the ‘failure’ of anticolonial movements in instantiating their dreams but rather a complex picture of the nuances and dynamics these mobilisations entailed and had to endure. The laudatory approach towards this anticolonial moment and the politics of solidary mobilised during the 1960s evades problematising their multiple shortcomings while idealising transcending the nation as if this was always on the table as a matter of choice and strategy. ³⁹ In this regard, I follow the question posed by Sajed elsewhere, who, rather than assuming failures were due to these movements’ reliance on such a Eurocentric model as the nation-state, invites us to reflect upon ‘what was actually possible’ during this period. ⁴⁰

Anticolonial nationalism responds to global structural constraints that limit the political strategies and imaginative resources of Third Worldist leaders, pushing them towards the nation and structures associated with it, such as race and whiteness, even as they are unsettled in a translocal web of anticolonial connectivities and spatialities. Instead of producing a post-national space, the paradox of anticolonialism is that it moves beyond the nation-state while continuing to inhabit the nation’s complicated framework. Thus, ‘the translocal is not so much the negation/transcendence of the nation-state, but the condition for its actualization and thus a form of spatiality that never fully incorporates the national but neither does it completely evade it’. ⁴¹

Directly entering this debate, this article engages with Jalal Al-e Ahmad to question how his anticolonial discourse articulated attachments to the nation and how these bonds worked by mobilising affects, emotions and desires. By adding an affective and emotional layer to the problems and possibilities of anticolonial nationalism, I hope to sustain that ‘opting out’ of nationalism or ‘escaping the nation’ entailed much more than imagining post-national orders away from Eurocentric structures or building national consciousness as Fanon would propose. I suggest that anticolonial groups become affectively attached to powerful objects of identification such as the nation-state, a condition that further complicates the postcolonial malaises of nationalism. Getting away from the pervasiveness of a political order centred on the nation entails breaking and reforming community bonds in which subjects are actively invested, a process which often questions the very subjectivity of those involved. This article engages with this discussion through the discursive material of Al-e Ahmad, as he offered alternative visions of Iran while investing in a national teleology that curtailed his project’s decolonial potential.

Gharbzadegi further complicates the messy scene in which anticolonialism played out in Iran, indicating some tensions inherent to the national liberation struggle. Pathologising the nation, Jalal Al-e Ahmad configured a translocal politics of solidarity made out of the wounds and pain he had endured as a colonial subject, a psycho-affective condition employed as the basis of his anticolonial connectivity. However, this network clashed with the national form at his discourse’s core, as the phantom keeping his anticolonial project at bay, manifested in the easiness with which the gharbzadeh became the scapegoats for all those put outside of the nation’s confines by the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic, especially women. In the end, gharbzadegi became the paranoia it supposedly tried to diagnose.

Fanon and the appeal of nationalism

Addressing the power of socially mediated constructions on the internalisation of subjugation, alienation and paranoia, Frantz Fanon distinguished himself from traditional European psychoanalysis by historicising the symbolic order and the subject. He subverted the universalising and ‘culturally undifferentiated’ character implied in these concepts. ⁴² For instance, this departure occurs when he, as a black man, ‘had to meet the white man’s eyes’, a look famously expressed in the white child’s speech, ‘“Look, a Negro!”’. ⁴³ This encounter symbolised the coloniser’s racist gaze scarring, staining and crushing Fanon’s body as a site of ambivalence driven out by ‘a confrontation with an image of himself that fundamentally distorts the relationship with his physical and psychological being, and his collective as well as individual identifications’. ⁴⁴ ‘Woven [. . .] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ that made himself ‘an object in the midst of other objects’, Fanon does not resort to a universalising stance which posits such scene as a mere interpellation act from which he is brought into (non)being through language. ⁴⁵ According to his account, the colonised’s subjectivity is yet to be found, captured and ‘made [itself] known’ by further co-habiting the symbolic and being divorced from it as a historically and culturally specific positionality. ⁴⁶

With his persistent critique of the Oedipus complex as ‘far from coming into being among Negroes’ and the unconscious as a far-fetched delusion in the colonies (‘the black man has no time to “make [the racial drama] unconscious”’), ⁴⁷ Fanon posits the colonial symbolic structure, here reproduced through traditional psychoanalysis, as missing in its performative function for the racialised. ⁴⁸ The colonised never engage with this identification process since denying their subjecthood is integral to the white subject’s constitution and, dare to say, enjoyment. ⁴⁹ This denial, reflective of the colonised’s introjected inferiority, progressively calcifies into desires, narratives and libido (enjoyment/jouissance) articulated through discourse, in this case, discourses of the civilising nation and coming out of the civilising language. Not by chance, Fanon starts his first book with a chapter on the power of language, as ‘to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture’, and, I would say, all the symbolic coordinates, meanings, signifiers which end up constraining, dominating and destroying the colonised existence as such. ⁵⁰

With this emphasis on the sociopolitical discursive construction of the subject, we can read the colonised experience as a failed identification process but not in terms of a universal path towards subjectivity, as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan would suggest when talking about fantasy. The identification never occurs, its main feature is its own negation continuously reproduced for the enjoyment and constitution of the coloniser. For the colonised, there is no other way for their existence than attempting a cruel, bare and ‘hellish’ detachment from this order and whiteness as its master signifier, embodying the nothingness that confronts, traverses and ultimately embraces the racialised in the perilous ‘zone of nonbeing’. ⁵¹

By working against and through psychoanalysis Fanon articulated a revolutionary praxis aimed at anticolonial struggle, building a corpus of critique worried with not only delving into the postcolonial condition but with providing possibilities for change. ⁵² This is where he engages with the questions nationalism poses for decolonisation, as he explores national cultures’ symptomatic shortcomings and positive openings. As David Macey remarks in a critique of postcolonial readings of Fanon, ‘[t]he Third Worldist Fanon was an apocalyptic creature; the post-colonial Fanon worries about identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity, but he is no longer angry’. ⁵³ Besides being put into use as a practical revolutionary resource, all this anger found its way into Fanon’s texts in the form of an examination of the traps the nation can lead to as a decolonial means of emancipation.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad crafted imaginaries of national liberation that referred to Third Worldism as a project of reclaiming political subjecthood in Iran and reorienting libidinal energy away from master signifiers associated with imperialism and colonialism, including the nation but through an appropriation of its anticolonial value. By considering that this intellectual’s anticolonial work reverberated in specific identification processes constitutive of an Iranian national ideal, I delve upon his writings as discursive formations indicative of the rhythms of enjoyment articulated within decolonisation. ⁵⁴ Assailing and subject-wrecking, the colonial symbolic is rearticulated by Al-e Ahmad’s anticolonial discourse, which redirects desires, fantasies, and enjoyment towards the formation of national attachments. National consciousness is employed as a path towards liberation and freedom from the shackles of American and British imperialism, themselves inculcated on Iranians’ racialised positioning as non-subjects in the global sphere. Whether by viewing the Shah as the epitome of the self-negation Iranians had experienced or gharbzadegi as a tentative response against this symbolic background of subjection, the nation appears with its bulk of ideals, promises, dreams and perils.

Fanon provides ways of thinking, understanding and theorising the nation and the processes that sustain it as a major structuring force in international relations. The nation’s Eurocentrism is remarked as one prevailing straitjacket for anticolonial movements, intellectuals and activists’ emancipatory and liberation potential. ⁵⁵ Similarly, disentangling and disattaching their struggle from the nation’s pervasive appeal as an identification object filled with affects, desires, fantasies and enjoyment is a complicated endeavour, to say the least. Together, these two considerations provide a framework that enables grasping the actual facticity of alternatives to the nation.

Considering Fanonian theory’s performative action towards the realities it addresses (and helps build), there is an instantiation of its conceptual apparatus in our context in 1960s Iran. I turn to Fanon not seeking answers, a move he cautiously advises against when saying he does not come with ‘timeless truths’ but rather more questions which could aid in setting analytical paths and theoretical openings worth exploring and firmly positioned in relation to the colonial condition. ⁵⁶ For instance, while the workings of nationalist fantasy, desire and enjoyment are visible in the discourses of gharbzadegi, the Pahlavis likewise mobilised fixed narratives of an idealised past of Persian glory through an Aryanist mythos which put racial purity (whiteness, yet idealised and never within Iranians’ grasp) as central to Iranianness. ⁵⁷

The conflicted Iranian subject manifests the impossible position to which they are directed by Euro-American modernity, imprisoned between the Eurocentric categories to which they aspire and the naked, bare reality of objecthood, racialisation and dehumanisation that this lexicon inflicts upon Iranian society. As Jasmine Gani sustains relying on Fanon, this imperial encounter reproduces a civilisational schema that is internalised in the form of racial hierarchies by racialised communities, such as Iran, and ultimately responds to anxieties within the metropole, especially regarding its ‘Muslim other’, a menace to be eliminated. ⁵⁸ Amidst calls to dispose of everything deemed as ‘Semitic’ by the Pahlavi dynasty, of the Western cultural disease by revolutionaries and the Islamic Republic, there appears to persist a continual attempt to claim the lost grandeur of an Iranian nation, a past empire that had to deal with the pervasive positioning of its culture and history at the bottom of civilisation by Europe and the United States. With this framing, I approach the paradox anticolonial nationalism poses in Iran by being indebted to how Fanon theorised the internalisation of this inferiority complex and viewed the nation as not the ultimate or only step towards decolonisation but as a critical resource to be appropriated by anticolonial struggles. Both these processes, the internalisation of stigma and rearticulation of nationalism, entail touching upon fantasies, desires and affects that have been hailed as the colonial symbolic’s bedrock. The affective and libidinal links between the colonised and coloniser paint a more complex picture of alternatives to the nation, as they seem to lack much space of possibility when you are symbiotically attached to the Eurocentric nexus of the national form. Nevertheless, anticolonial and revolutionary actors in the Third World invoked such an object of identification in different ways and through different paths, an effort towards which we direct our analysis now by being positioned in Iran and submerged into the discursive material of Al-e Ahmad.

Gharbzadegi: Pathologising, injuring and suturing the Iranian nation

Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69) was an Iranian intellectual and prose writer who grappled with a life filled with ambiguity, anxiety and a desire to move against the cultural alienation imposed upon Iran through the centuries and most markedly during the Pahlavi era. A ‘seminal figure in the history of the Iranian encounter with colonial modernity’, he came from a Shi’i clerical family in Tehran and, throughout his formative years, immersed himself in the cosmopolitan and cultural life of the capital, from which he started to act through writing and political activism. ⁵⁹ Passing through secular leftist groups such as the Tudeh and Khalil Maleki’s ephemeral Third Force, Al-e Ahmad initially kept his distance from religious politics, as he wished to take a different path than his father and saw the clergy as one of the powerful forces poisoning Iranian society, preferring to study literature in the university. ⁶⁰ However, especially after performing the hajj pilgrimage in 1964, the later-to-be-known ‘Iranian intellectual par excellence’ ⁶¹ reintegrated Islam more deeply into his political discourses and sociocultural critiques, among which Gharbzadegi, first published in 1962, had taken centre stage.

Following his previous claims that Iran historically presents an ‘anticolonial modernity’ and, as an emerging modern nation, subscribed to a worldly consciousness, ⁶² Hamid Dabashi recovers Jalal Al-e Ahmad from the myopic gaze of the Islamic Republic to call him ‘the last Muslim intellectual’. ⁶³ Deliberately provocative, this title intends to ‘think of a post-Islamist moral and intellectual agency for a world he could not anticipate’, resting on the premise that ‘Islam in Iran ended when it ended all its real and worldly alterities’ with 1979’s Islamist takeover. ⁶⁴ Al-e Ahmad embodied the last breaths of a vibrant cosmopolitan political culture whose radical substrate aligned with his identity as a Muslim in constant dialogue with other imaginative resources, in and out of Islam. His engagement with religion did not define his worldview in the same manner as his contemporary Ali Shariati since, for Dabashi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad fractured the equation of Islam with a unidirectional callback to the past and tradition by occupying a space of contradiction and heteroglossia, conditioned by coloniality. ⁶⁵

I certainly do not concur with Dabashi’s laudatory remarks, particularly the one that frames Al-e Ahmad as the epitome of his time’s worldly imagination and the book’s overarching claim of him being the last and only Muslim intellectual. ⁶⁶ As Homa Katouzian expressed in his review, both singularising and depicting him as Muslim deserve further explanation. ‘the implication that there were and are no Muslim intellectuals, even including public intellectuals, from Indonesia through the Subcontinent and the Middle East to Morocco beggars belief’, since Al-e Ahmad’s own trajectory exemplifies the far-reaching background of Islamic thought experienced in Iran and elsewhere. ⁶⁷ Discrediting other figures that contributed to this intellectual scene, such as al-Afghani and Ali Shariati, just because they do not ascribe to an idealised ‘worldly’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘dialogical’ consciousness as Al-e Ahmad supposedly did seems to me a violent erasure of intellectuals from the world’s multiple Islamicate contexts. Nevertheless, despite his overly congratulatory and sometimes even hagiographical approach, Dabashi does the vital work of repositioning Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy among anticolonial and Third Worldist peers. In this context, gharbzadegi became a preliminary window into such worldliness, despite the framework’s shortcomings and misreadings.

A neologism now contemporary to Iranian political discourse, gharbzadegi was originally coined by the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid, who intended to transmit and position the anti-modernist and counter-Enlightenment critiques he had apprehended through contact with European thinkers, especially Martin Heidegger, in the Iranian plateau. Al-e Ahmad’s detachment from this debate split their views on this concept and annoyed Fardid the most. ⁶⁸ Interestingly, it was the former’s innovative depiction, with its turn to Islam and setting in a transnational space of ideas rested on Third World authors, that made gharbzadegi gain notoriety among Iranians. As the author remarks, he had thought the discussion he set in the book ‘would grow dated after a year or two’, but ‘the limbs of [his] society have remained afflicted’, and ‘the contagion spreads day by day’. ⁶⁹

Initially banned by the Iranian Ministry of Education, Gharbzadegi informally surfaced in 1962 as an independently published report that Al-e Ahmad had made regarding the status of Iranian culture under Pahlavi rule. It quickly dominated intellectual circles and became a motto that captured Iranians’ despair and disillusionment with the Pahlavi monarchy and fuelled a social upheaval alongside growing calls for revolution by Islamists, leftists and feminists, among other dissident groups. The appeal of Al-e Ahmad’s discourse, I will contend, comes partly from how it articulated an affective economy that resonated with the Iranian population by constructing the Iranian nation as an injured object and, most prominently, by equating it to a fallen ill body.

As Ali Gheissari explains, ‘most connotations of gharbzadegi include the image of the nation or state as an organism’, with its most common English translations referring to it as ‘Westoxification’ or ‘Occidentosis’. ⁷⁰ The sickness is described as such at the outset of the book:

I speak of ‘occidentosis’ as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From the inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree. At any rate, I am speaking of a disease: an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it. ⁷¹

For Al-e Ahmad, Iran lies in bed as the victim of a cultural virus, one that rots its social flesh and punctures its political skin with the Eurocentrism that has condemned it to life in disarray. This inculcation of national disillusionment and decay on Iranians’ minds trapped them in a ‘rhinoceros’s skin’, as the ultimate result of a series of bodily changes resulting from a fever, a voice becoming ‘thick and coarse’, the apparition of a horn on one’s forehead, the loss of speech in favour of animal cries and the thickening of the skin. ⁷² Rather than anthropomorphising the Iranian national body, it is pathologised and equated to an animal under duress, the fatal condition of those affected by gharbzadegi, the gharbzadeh (Westoxificated, occidentotic). These metaphors constitute the Iranian subject as an injured object whose pain is at the same time a testament to colonial violence and a symptom to be cured so an alternative future can be built, a project Al-e Ahmad is eager to advance.

This characterisation of Iran reflects a framing made through narratives of pain. The nation draws on a sense of unity made out of suffering to form its national subjects, who identify with the performative action such a wound evokes. ‘The experience of pain’, Sara Ahmed conveys,

– the feeling of being stabbed by a foreign object that pierces the skin, that cuts you into pieces – is bound up with what cannot be recovered, with something being taken away that cannot be returned. The loss is, in some sense, the loss of a ‘we’, the loss of a community based on everyday conversations, on the coming and goings of bodies, in time and in space [. . .]. Out of the cutting of this body and this community, surfaces a different body, formed as it is by the intensity of the pain. A community that cries together, which comes together in this gesture of loss, and which comes together in the painful feeling that togetherness is lost. ⁷³

In the assumption of a new skin, a ‘rhinoceros’s skin’, Al-e Ahmad conducts a nation-building exercise out of the wounds Iran has experienced under coloniality, which has trapped it amidst the promises and fantasies of Westernising development. This disfiguration is affectively expressed in the pain inflicted upon Iranians by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and, ultimately, ‘the West’, whether the actual physical pain endured in everyday struggles under ‘the machine’ and the regime’s oppressive practices or the painful experience of losing identity and not being able to become subject. The latter refers to the historical shame of being dictated by foreign actors, of living ‘on handouts from the West’, building up resentment with what has been lost under the hands of imperial powers such as Russia, Britain and the United States throughout their violent incursions on Iran. Against this, Al-e Ahmad says, we have ‘to put this jinn [genie] back into the bottle’, ‘to break it into harness like a draft animal’ so it can answer to our wishes and desires while breaking the shackles that had enslaved us to it. ⁷⁴

Integral to this discourse, ‘the machine’, ‘a demon’ manufactured and exported by Western Europe and the United States, further paralyses Iran in its developing path, as it sentences Iranians to a Westernising modernity which has been harmful to the population at the hands of the Pahlavi dynasty and its modernisation programmes. ⁷⁵ Poised to accept European modernity as is and the cultural disease that comes with it (gharbzadegi) or hark back to tradition and local customs in complete denial of technology and industry, Al-e Ahmad seeks another way out of this sickness. Confronted by this bleak prognosis, the Iranian writer seeks to break the bondage of dependency by taming the beast of neocolonial capitalism, that is, the machines, industries, manufactured goods and symbols imported from Europe and the United States as the baseline standard Iranians must follow. Interestingly, this process incited a longing for what surpassed and went beyond the nation, not finding space in the somewhat limited domain and social mobilisation of gharbzadegi.

Al-e Ahmad’s translocal promises and pitfalls

Throughout his life, Jalal Al-e Ahmad journeyed to different places worldwide, which informed his thinking about the colonial processes pushed by Europe and the US into Iran and the Third World, inciting a sense of anticolonial solidarity in the author. Among these, he wrote travelogues about his visits to the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel, and Mecca and Medina between 1962 and 1965, ⁷⁶ besides shorter ethnographical stories about some of his travels that had occurred within Iran the decade before. In the US, during his last trip, Al-e Ahmad revealed his intention to publish these foreign travelogues in a more extended and complete piece:

It has occurred to me to put together a book made of these travel notes and the ones I have written before, a book to be called ‘Four Kaabas’ or ‘Pilgrimage to Four Kaabas’, or some such title, meaning placing myself in front of four Kaabas (Mecca, Jerusalem, Moscow, and New York) and of course a comparison among these Kaabas. I can place the European notes somewhere there too. ⁷⁷

Considering the reference points of the ‘West’ (Western Europe and the US), Mecca, Jerusalem and Soviet Russia alongside the desire to investigate his local cities and villages, we grasp a specific articulation of the translocal-national dyad that informed Al-e Ahmad’s life and found expression in his limited theorisation of gharbzadegi. For him, ‘traveling is another way of knowing the self, of evaluating it and coming to grips with its limitations and how narrow, insignificant and empty it is, in the proving ground of changing climes by means of encounters and human assessments’. ⁷⁸ In the uneasiness expressed in the notes, we can see the translocality to which Jalal Al-e Ahmad aspired, but that could not be instantiated through the national pain identified by gharbzadegi, with Al-e Ahmad’s encounters and exchanges exposing its limitations.

Those four places that would compose his unpublished collection provide an opening into the global structure underwritten in Al-e Ahmad’s thinking. Though most of the notes he gathered in his international voyages only recount his daily routine in an often-rushed manner, taken together, all of them reflect an interstitial space of strangeness, violence and ambivalence. Al-e Ahmad’s four master signifiers composed an enmeshed web of relations which ran deep in the identification complexes he struggled against, which found a limited expression in the debate around gharbzadegi but ultimately mirrored diverse articulations of the postcolonial condition. While I do not intend to go into details of the travelogues themselves, especially considering the preliminary aspect of many of the notes exposed there, I find the juxtaposition of the Four Kaabas and the cultural diagnosis found in Al-e Ahmad’s most prominent book particularly revealing, as through it we can appreciate a distinct enunciation of the translocal-national tension of anticolonialism in Iran.

As the most complete, the travel narratives written in Israel and Saudi Arabia uncover Al-e Ahmad as someone stretched out by, on the one hand, a global politics of anticolonial solidarity and connectivity that unsettle the nation-state, and, on the other, the capitulation of that project, emerging from the nationalist tinges he insists on exploring. In a scathing and angry critique, he exclaims: ‘[w]hat racists and what Arab haters are the French, small and large, the left along with the right! No one thought – and I least of all – that the imprint of Algeria would remain on their hearts like this’. Then, he proclaims that ‘the Nazis’ behaviour yesterday towards the Jews is what the Jews, with the aid of the troubled consciences in Europe and America, are, as we speak, doing to the Arabs’. In a counterpoint to that, ‘the experience of Cuba and Algeria and China has shown that the hand of colonialism can only be severed with an ax’. ⁷⁹ In this exploration, Al-e Ahmad constitutes a translocal connectivity between the racism in the French metropolis and the racialised violence espoused in the Algerian war, and Nazism and settler-colonial Israel, whose antidote demands revolutionary resistance. ⁸⁰ Yet, while in Mecca and Medina, where supposedly all borders, limits and confines should submerge under the plight of the ummah, there is an enduring investment in turning Islam into a distinctively Iranian force. As Michael Hillmann remarks in the introduction to the hajj travelogue, instead of rejoicing with the diversity of Islamic threads united there, Al-Ahmad searches ‘in early Islam such Iranian connections as Salman the Persian, one of Mohammad’s earliest followers, and in contemporary Islam, an Iranian association with Shi’i Islamic doctrine as opposed to Arab association with Sunni doctrine’. ⁸¹ Besides the anti-Arab sentiment prevalent in Iranian intellectual circles at the time, this betrays the constant fluctuation between locales, scales and spaces from which Al-e Ahmad mobilises the critiques on modernity and development visible in Gharbzadegi.

Gharbzadegi follows the spirit of the Bandung Conference in its reaction against the prevailing call for development and modernisation by Western powers, as well as in its turn to Islam, a move shared by other intellectuals and activists in the Third World seeking local answers to global problems in religion. ⁸² For Dabashi, this granted a space for Jalal Al-e Ahmad in the same echelon as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. ⁸³ As a ‘post-development concept’ and ‘a counter-hegemonic critique of the entwined global processes of racialisation and colonial exploitation’, Al-e Ahmad’s framework called for social change by reclaiming an Islamic-Iranian identity, as he saw Islam and Iran as coterminous. ⁸⁴ By doing this, he not only criticised ‘the West’ for turning Islam into its imaginary civilisational enemy through imperialism and colonialism but also mobilised an identification process to heal these national wounds, cure this disease and redeem Iranian subjecthood.

Even though the book lacks details regarding the concrete steps enabling this process, it hints at a ground-up dynamic of sociopolitical change by mentioning some reforms. Against the hegemony of great corporations and the state in ‘the great systems for molding opinion’, Al-e Ahmad defends that the television and radio ‘must be for the benefit and at the disposal of the public, through elected councils of writers and intellectuals’. In a similar vein, democracy is only meaningful when it is ‘made to penetrate the depths of society through a sustained effort at education’, whereas, in contrast, the uncritical import of ‘Western-style democracy’ only serves its proponents’ parochial interests. ⁸⁵

While indeed this critical position regarding the state evades a state-centrist approach to decolonisation, as Saffari suggested, ⁸⁶ I take issue with the claim that it also marks a departure from a nationalist framework. These proposals resemble Fanon’s call for national consciousness, as they, notably through the work of committed intellectuals, enrich nationalism to work for the Iranian people, whose consciousness gets rid of the alienation that infected it. Despite its anticolonial vein, it remains following a national teleology, as the injured, ailing Iranian nation, aided by a powerful Islamic vein, is still articulated as the counterpoint to the overarching ‘West’ in Al-e Ahmad’s discourse. Not by chance, it is in this dichotomy of the West versus the East that the writer’s analysis is at its weakest, lacking historical evidence and constituting a civilisational schema in which multiple relations and sites of possibility between these opposite poles are subsumed by the presumed conflict of an Islamic East with a Christian West. ⁸⁷ Following Sajed’s theorisation of anticolonial nationalism, I would say that gharbzadegi ends up rethinking modernity (and its accompanying nation-state) by posing an alternative imaginary of Iran that values coloniality as its underlying condition. ⁸⁸ Yet, it falls short of unthinking modernity and moving beyond nationalism ‘as the telos of anticolonial struggle’, something that is also seen in its lack of questioning of the necessity of development (‘the machine’), which should only be repurposed.

This tension at the heart of gharbzadegi also manifests itself through economies of class and gender, attesting to what Sajed called ‘the paradox of anticolonial nationalism’, meaning how ‘its fluid spatiality [. . .] produces a rigid socio-political form of organization that aims to eliminate that very fluidity’. ⁸⁹ Mirsepassi remarks that the Pahlavi regime paradoxically and strategically embraced ‘anti-modern’ discourses in a political gamble ‘to establish itself as the authentic governing force in Iran’ against the ‘Western-inspired’ Iranian leftists and liberals who opposed Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign. ⁹⁰ Proving the malleability of gharbzadegi and the fluidity with which the Iranian national project was rebranded among Iranians, even the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, espoused its critique in an attempt at favouring the monarchy by capturing the mass movement Al-e Ahmad had incited, a move that ultimately secured the regime’s downfall. Though a failure, this attempted appropriation by the Pahlavis exemplifies an ongoing process in the 1960s through the intellectual paranoia regarding US and Soviet imperialism, which dictated almost everything wrong to be one of these poles’ evil machinations. This mainly consisted of a worry restricted to some intellectual classes, which interpreted gharbzadegi as a symbol of the importance of committed intellectuals, regardless of its great popular appeal, something the Pahlavis also expressed through their condescending and elitist approach towards subaltern classes.

Perhaps nowhere the capture of the gharbzadegi discourse has proven to be most visible, pernicious and enduring than concerning gender politics. The figure of the gharbzadeh women, the ‘Westoxicated Barbie dolls’ ‘who wore “too much” make-up, “too short” a skirt, “too tight” a pair of pants, “too low-cut” a shirt, who w[ere] “too loose” in [their] relations with men, who laughed “too loudly”, who smoked in public’, became a trademark of the segregation and social control enforced upon Iranian women after the revolution, with Ayatollah Khomeini’s imposition of mandatory veiling turning into a battleground for feminist groups in Iran that has persisted until today. ⁹¹ By increasing its reach and appeal in Iranian society, gharbzadegi’s discourse soon turned modern women into one of the scapegoats for Iranian social and cultural decay, with its author claiming that emancipation, in its current form, would succeed ‘only in swelling an army of consumers of powder and lipstick’. ⁹² The gharbzadeh was ‘effeminate’, ⁹³ and Iranian women had to actualise their image to the conservative ideal of ‘modern-yet-modest’ to avoid being marked as ‘the painted dolls of the Pahlavi regime’. ⁹⁴ Gharbzadegi applied to all women deemed culturally ill and supposedly disconnected from their indigenous culture, who were either represented through unveiling for the Islamic groups or modern attire, attitudes or freedoms associated with the West for the more secular and leftist. Through these cases, the calcification of the fluid and dynamic connectivities and solidarities to which Al-e Ahmad aspired into the rigid borders, identities and hierarchies of the nation-state and its many scapegoats revealed the class and gender erasures gharbzadegi was complicit in reproducing.

It is by no chance that the powerful discourse of gharbzadegi assumed such a prominent position in the revolutionary movement of 1978–79. By blaming Iranian society for ‘for two hundred years [. . .] resembl[ing] the crow mimicking the partridge’, it explores the desire to be Western as one of the main predicaments of Iranian backwardness. ⁹⁵ There are almost the explicit workings of enjoyment in the disease, the ‘accident from without’ that is blamed for the failures of the Iranian nation, with the scapegoating fantasies of the West and the glorious timeline of Islam interpellating the Iranian subject as it deals with the ambiguity and abnegation colonial violence and imperial pressure brought to the table of the identifications it attempts to accomplish. ⁹⁶ In this discourse, pain is taken as foundational to a new Iranian nation, one that can enjoy as much as the British and Americans enjoy at the cost of the injuries, wounds, and sickness inflicted upon Iranians. Nevertheless, as Fanon warns, this new positioning does not change the impossibility of identification for the colonised, enmeshed in desires and fantasies whose fulfilment remains ever fleeting. That Jalal Al-e Ahmad did not ‘escape the nation’ does not mean he consciously chose not to do so. Instead, it signals that, in the unsettling and reframing of modernity that he proposed, the nation-state remained as a central locus of affective investment, an identification object surrounded by the pain of suffering gharbzadegi, the resentment of not having ‘the machine’ and not enjoying like the West, and the hope of a new anticolonial subjectivity unlocked from the precepts of Euro-American (and Pahlavi) modernisation.

This is where I depart from Dabashi, ⁹⁷ as I claim that Al-e Ahmad embodied a worldly consciousness like other Third World authors did at the time (Fanon, Césaire) but also expressed the limits of such an anticolonial moment, something seen in the psycho-affective structuring of gharbzadegi. These limits unavoidably were captured in how he articulated the nation according to his cosmopolitan view. As Sadeghi-Boroujerdi aptly says, ‘it is perhaps his [Al-e Ahmad’s] critique of the basic epistemological, political and spatial categories of the nation-state that is most relevant today’ since it puts him and Iran in the global context of coloniality and among intellectuals interested in questioning the pernicious effects of colonial modernity. ⁹⁸ Nevertheless, despite his continual unsettling and reconfiguration of the nation-state model, we see that Jalal Al-e Ahmad remains affectively attached to a national teleology that puts the nation at the start and the end of the national liberation story. In this framework, the experience of pain bonds the Iranian subject to its nation, as the pathologised national body whose illness must be cured. Anticolonial nationalism à la Al-e Ahmad entails encircling this wound with desires to develop and become modern, a premise viewed in how ‘the machine’ appears as a blessing and a curse in his book, even if reworked towards the collective modernisation and development of Iran and ‘the East’. In this sense, as promising as Al-e Ahmad’s discourse was with his on-point critique of the cultural alienation and identification complexes of the colonised, his indefinite, trembling praxis left his utopian horizons open for grabs, contributing to his framing as an ‘anticolonial failure’ which the Islamic Republic quickly monopolised. Still, the afterlives of this anticolonial imagination remain active, reverberating in radical visions of resistance and anticolonialism in Iran and the postcolonial world.

On grievances and hopes

The modern nation-state has proved to be an enduring and pervasive collective construct, which persists as a continuous master signifier in global politics, inciting subjects to identify with it and to act pushed by it. More than that, we are enticed to love, hate, feel and even die for the nation, whether through supremacist discourses which appeal to whiteness as a community bond, more everyday situations such as an international sports event where your country is competing, or anticolonial groups whose struggle pass through reformulating the nation according to emancipatory aims. All these contexts become more significant to us by actively attaching our identifications and subjecthood to this constructed object, a process that unavoidably is affective.

This article discussed these dimensions with an engagement with what has been termed the paradox of anticolonial nationalism, meaning the contestation of global politics’ Eurocentric and colonial structure through one of its central nodes, the nation-state. Against this tethering of decolonisation to nationalism, Fanon proposed that the search for political independence and autonomy must entail a ground-up social change movement that builds sociopolitical consciousness, breaks cultural alienation and reclaims subjecthood for colonised peoples, all captured in his concept of national consciousness. However, as our case showed, this process proves to be hard, as people are affectively invested in such political structures as the nation, which provides emotional gains to its subscribers by forming community bonds and promising a complete, stable identity they can enjoy.

Pre-revolutionary Iran provides a rich scenario for our exploration of anticolonial nationalism, with authors such as Dabashi going as far as saying that it is a modern nation ‘by virtue of an anticolonial modernity’ which has ‘blessed’ and ‘afflicted’ it. ⁹⁹ In this context, Jalal Al-e Ahmad emerges as a dissident writer who contested Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s authoritarian politics by marking Iran as a disease-ridden nation and imagining a decolonial future detached from colonial modernity. Gharbzadegi sets out a scathing critique of Westernising modernisation by pathologising Iran through a narrative of pain, resentment and hope. The wounded Iranian nation, whose cultural and sociopolitical roots had been cut, should claim its anticolonial subjectivity and sit alongside its allies in the Third World, poised to rearticulate a national identification delinked from the impossible standards of Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, as many decolonisation struggles in Africa and Asia had proven last century, this detachment is more complicated than it seems. With the Islamic Republic’s clerical establishment’s kidnapping of gharbzadegi lurking in the back of our heads, Al-e Ahmad’s rethinking of modernity seems to have fallen short of its decolonial potential, remaining tethered to the same modern nation-state model Ayatollah Khomeini would rearticulate for his particular aims later on.

Al-e Ahmad was not interested in going beyond the nation-state model, with his project challenging the Eurocentric and Westernised modernity of the Pahlavi dynasty and, in this process, articulating an alternative vision for the Iranian nation. Gharbzadegi, despite its critique of modernisation resembling other intellectual trends in the Third World, such as dependency theory and Islamic anti-Western thought, failed to generate great appeal for other anticolonial movements with his amalgamation of various oppressive structures under the guise of one cultural ‘disease’. Ultimately, despite the unrealised dream glimpsed in the Four Kaabas, ‘what was actually possible’ for Jalal Al-e Ahmad in Gharbzadegi did not fundamentally entail instantiating a translocal understanding of modernity and the nation. The grievances and hopes of his generation found expression and died through the same pathological grammar.