Stanford University Press Blog

Letting AI Read for Us Can Undermine Our Thinking

The complexities of outsourcing literacy

NAOMI S. BARON

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

It is said that in the tenth century, the Grand Vizier of Persia traveled with his books –117,000 of them. A caravan of 400 camels bore the load, walking in alphabetical order. Fast forward eight centuries to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, on military campaigns, brought along both a portable library and personal librarian. More recently, at the October 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair (whose origins trace back to the middle ages), 215,000 people came to enjoy the offerings of 4,000 exhibiters.

Reading has long been valued as a source of information and ideas, not to mention as an enjoyable pastime. Media options have evolved, from handwritten manuscripts to print to digital books to audiobooks. But the task for readers remains the same. Besides decoding the words, we strive to make sense of them. Our interpretations often draw upon personal experience and other works we have read. Especially for material that engages or challenges us, the process of reading becomes an act of thinking.

A crucial question in the age of artificial intelligence is whether AI threatens to undermine human reading. As a linguist who has studied the impact of AI on human writing, I am equally concerned about people relying on the technology to do their reading and sense-making for them.

Off the Page and onto the Big Screen

Top Films from SUP Authors

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

Contrary to popular belief, we’re not always buried in a book. Sometimes, we’re buried in a film. We reached out to a few of our authors to tell us about some of their favorite films – films that inspired their research, or films that they just happened to enjoy.

 

1. Chronicle of a Disappearance (dir. Elia Suleiman, 1996)

In Elia Suleiman’s debut feature, the director plays a version of himself, E.S., an expat Palestinian filmmaker attempting to piece together the fragmented story of a journey home and match it up with hilarious and poignant vignettes of life under occupation. Suleiman opts for deadpan humor to convey trauma and absurdity. An inheritor of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, Suleiman speaks volumes even though E.S. hardly utters a word in the entire film. When asked for a speech, E.S. finds himself drowned out by feedback from the microphones that are supposed to amplify his voice.

2. Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a visionary 21st century filmmaker, whose debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, was released in the year 2000. Memoria is nominally about an investigation into a mysterious loud sound that awakens Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat living in Columbia. Her search for an explanation leads her on an inner and outer journey that explores various secular and supernatural origins for the possible source of the uncanny sound. Personal and collective trauma bleeds into haunted places and lives whose histories are somehow joined across the world. There is no return home, only further openings into the unknown.

Contributed by J. M. Tyree, author of Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London.

Joshua recently contributed his own top ten list to the BFI.

You can explore his top picks here.

 

A Look at SUP's DH Virtual Exhibit

SUP is excited to present our titles for the Digital Humanities conference

 

In lieu of our booth exhibit, please enjoy this Virtual Book Exhibit and receive a 30% discount and free shipping to the US and Canada on the books listed below using the discount code S20XDH-FM

 

Stanford Digital Projects

 

The nascent fields of digital humanities and computational social sciences have ballooned in recent years. Emergent technologies and scholars’ increasing fluency with these technologies are providing academics with new ways to visualize, analyze, and interpret data. Yet, there are no formal channels for publication or consistent peer review standards for digital projects. Our initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, allows us to advance a publishing process that helps authors develop their concept (in both content and form) and reach their market effectively to confer the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as print books receive

 

Constructing the Sacred »

Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara

ELAINE A. SULLIVAN

"Unimaginable in any other format, this publication is a one-stop shop for our attempt to untangle the significance of Saqqara over time."

—Peter Der Manuelian, Harvard University

 

Utilizing 3D technologies, Constructing the Sacred addresses ancient ritual landscape from a unique perspective to examine development at the complex, long-lived archaeological site of Saqqara, Egypt. Sullivan focuses on how changes in the built and natural environment affected burial rituals at the temple due to changes in visibility. Flipping the top-down view prevalent in archeology to a more human-centered perspective puts the focus on the dynamic evolution of an ancient site that is typically viewed as static.

Start reading Elaine A. Sullivan's entry for the SUP blog Archaeological Landscapes And 3d Technologies »

 

 

Black Quotidian »

Everyday History in African-American Newspapers

MATTHEW F. DELMONT

Winner of the 2019 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities, sponsored by the American Studies Association (ASA) - Digital Humanities Caucus.

 

"Turning Black History Month on its head, Matthew Delmont insists that black life is not and cannot be limited to big events, past greats, or historical study in specified time slots. Distinctive and unique, Black Quotidian provides students an opportunity to examine the nuances and complexities of black life inside and outside the classroom."

—Nishani Frazier, Miami University

 

Black Quotidian explores everyday lives of African Americans in the twentieth century. Drawing on an archive of digitized African-American newspapers, Matthew F. Delmont guides readers through a wealth of primary resources that reveal how the Black press popularized African-American history and valued the lives of both famous and ordinary Black people. Claiming the right of Black people to experience and enjoy the mundane aspects of daily life has taken on a renewed resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter, an era marked by quotidian violence, fear, and mourning.

Coming of Age During the Cuban Revolution

Anna Veltfort on turning memories of living in Castro’s Havana into art

ANNA VELTFORT

Panel from Goodbye, My Havana »

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with Goodbye, My Havana» author Anna Veltfort

1. What made you want to write this memoir?

I had never been able to explain, to the people in my life in the US, what the Cuban Revolution was like or what my experience living in Cuba during the early years of the Revolution as a teenager and young adult was like, much less how it was to come out gay there. I attended all of high school and college in Havana, and came of age in a country, a historical period, utterly different from life in the United States. Writing and illustrating this memoir was the solution to my desire to convey at long last this strange and amazing experience of life on another planet.

 

2. Why did you choose to tell this story in color?

Cuba is a land of intense color, impossible for me to imagine in anything but full color. I also set out to use color as a visual stand-in for music and sometimes emotions. Thus to life in the USA, before moving to Cuba, I gave a muted palette intended to evoke the period of my childhood in the US during the 1950s. The long, difficult wait in Mexico before getting to Cuba, I rendered in a limited palette of blues and greys, and the times of terror in Cuba, when homophobic repression touched my life and of others I knew, in reds and orange.

 

3.  What was the writing process like?

1. First I created an annotated chronological timeline of the events, places and characters that I felt played a role in the story.
2. Guided by that timeline I wrote a running narrative of what would roughly be the whole book, subject to many changes, omissions and additions along the way. While crafting this narrative, I mined many letters, diaries, and photographs from that past, and consulted photographs that I commissioned as references from friends in Havana, drawings I had made in Cuba at the time, letters from my family. I had a trove of materials that I had brought from Cuba in 1972-- vinyl records, posters, books, magazines, political pamphlets, school papers, calendars... all very useful to transport my mind back into that time and place.
3. The key, and for me, most important and difficult part of the whole process happened now: translating this textual narrative into a visual narrative. This involved creating first rough thumbnail page-by-page sketches of panels and art and then more detailed storyboards of the panels, art and speech balloons for texts.

Implicated Subjects, Reparations, and the Afterlives of Slavery

To confront the legacies of slavery we need a new theory of historical responsibility

MICHAEL ROTHBERG

"Reparations" by Daquella manera is licensed under CC CC0 1.0  Public Domain Dedication

 

When I wrote about the question of reparations for slavery in my new book, The Implicated Subject, I did not expect to see the US House of Representatives holding hearings about that issue before my book even appeared. But on June 19, 2019, the House took up the perennially vexed and still controversial question of whether and how the descendants of America’s enslaved people should be compensated for slavery’s crimes against humanity.

On the eve of the hearing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced a familiar objection to the idea of redress: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom [sic] none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.” McConnell’s comments provided an opening for the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee the next day, to make a powerful case for reparations. Calling McConnell’s objection “a strange theory of governance,” Coates described the problem of reparations as “a dilemma of inheritance”: “It’s impossible,” he asserted, “to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.” The rest of his testimony traced how the afterlives of slavery have manifested themselves in all realms of American life: in state and federal laws, banking practices, and forms of physical violence that have ensured the ongoing subordination of people of African descent well into Mitch McConnell’s lifetime and indeed up until the present.

Reparations have been a recurrent demand of enslaved and freed people since the eighteenth century—and of their descendants in the decades since Emancipation—as scholars such as Ana Lucia Araujo have documented. Yet, national debate on the issue has seemed to reemerge with an astonishing suddenness. Long a marginalized concern, reparations have become almost mainstream—although we’re still a long way from their actualization in any meaningful form. In addition to the recent House hearings, no fewer than eleven Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support either for reparations or for studying their feasibility. The current discussions have not come out of nowhere, of course. Recent years have seen greater visibility for the issue, not least because of Coates’s widely read 2014 Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Nor is the discussion limited to the US; it is a distinctly transnational conversation emerging from various points across the Black Atlantic.

Taxing the Artist

What implications does the new GOP tax bill have for working artists?

by ALISON GERBER 

Photo by Mark Burnett. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

Today an opaque and as yet mostly unread GOP tax bill is hurtling towards the President’s desk. The media have mostly avoided a close look at the collective effects of the tax bill—the near-inevitable cuts to public services and national infrastructure that will affect all of us—and instead my feeds have been dripping for days with straightforward “ways to make the new tax bill work for you,” including a cynical guide to “hacking the tax plan” that promises to help you learn “ways to profit off the Republican tax bill.” A number of these pieces give the reader helpful hints on ways to turn themselves into business entities, as though setting up an LLC is something like getting a new set of business cards printed—do I go with a friendly diminutive like “Allie”, or the more formal “Alison”?—rather than a meaningful legal commitment with significant costs and responsibilities.

At the moment, it looks like artists’ abilities to end next year in the black will be tied up with one provision in particular: standardized deductions will double, but those who don’t file a Schedule C or set up a pass-through entity will lose the ability to deduct work-related expenses, a change that could hit performing artists especially hard. Musicians, dancers, and actors with steady gigs are often categorized as employees and receive W-2s; now it seems they’ll no longer be able to itemize and deduct expenses related to getting and doing those jobs, though most artists spend a significant proportion of their incomes on the costs of doing business (think: transportation costs; headshots; agents’ commissions; a dancer’s weekly supply of pointe shoes; that $19,000 tuba at the back of the orchestra and the extra $1,000 for the wheeled case its player needs to get it to work). Well, you might ask, why not just file a Schedule C? It’s not that easy, though.

It looks like artists’ abilities to end next year in the black will be tied up with one provision in particular: some artists may lose the ability to deduct work-related expenses.

 

The Erotic Image

What differentiates holy desires from pornographic ones?

by NATALIE CARNES

"Madonna of the Nursing Child" by Lorenzo di Credi.

Mary looks down toward her bared breast, which is shaped like a cone and placed rather high on her chest in Lorenzo di Credi’s Madonna of the Nursing Child. The Christ-child’s lips part to receive her breast. He seems moments from suckling, yet his eyes remain locked on the viewer.

Di Credi’s is one of many images of the nursing Mary (Maria lactans) that appear in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (Byzantine iconographers had been producing them for centuries, calling images of the bare-breasted Mary Galaktotrophousa, the Milk-giver.) But by the seventeenth century, these once-popular images had become much less common. In 2008, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano responded to the decline of Maria lactans by calling for the rehabilitation of a semi-nude nursing Mary. Such images, it maintained, are important testimonies to the humanity of Christ, ways of nurturing desire for the God made flesh.

Later in 2008, Playboy in Mexico ran a December cover with a woman posing in front of stained glass, her hand cupping her exposed breast. The headline read, “Te Adoramos, María.” The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights denounced the image. This was not the kind of Mary the Catholic Church had in mind. It was certainly not the kind of desire it wanted to nurture.

Most of us, whether or not we identify with the Catholic Church’s line on pornography, can still discern a difference between di Credi’s Mary and Playboy’s María. But how, exactly, can one name it?

The Stories We Tell

Depictions of Latinx experiences in the US grapple with upward mobility and linked fate.

by ELDA MARÍA ROMÁN

CC0 via Pixabay.

As morality tales, stories about upward mobility disseminate values and offer critiques of our socioeconomic hierarchies. Films about organized crime and the finance industry like The Godfather II and Wall Street convey that you might rise financially, but you can descend ethically. In contrast, a film like The Pursuit of Happyness, with its honest protagonist who leaves behind homelessness through perseverance and education, emphasizes that moral strength leads to success. Meanwhile, Cinderella, Pretty Woman, and Maid in Manhattan suggest that love can transcend class divisions and anyone can rise up through a generous partner or marriage.

Yet stock stories about upward mobility vary depending on genre and method of distribution, as well as on race and ethnicity. Even when they’re about individuals, narratives involving Latinx and African Americans often engage with the economic barriers that particularly affect these groups—barriers like not having the level of intergenerational wealth and resources that white families have (which determine schooling, residential, and employment options) and also criminalizing discourses that impact rates of incarceration and deportation. Despite differences in class and ideology within ethnic groups, ethnic upward mobility narratives try to impart a sense of collective identity for social action. How do they do so?

Stock stories about upward mobility vary depending on genre and method of distribution, as well as on race and ethnicity.

“What Are you Wearing?”

On aural sex and the mysterious disappearance of audio porn.

by DOMINIC PETTMAN

Public domain via pxhere.

You are feeling frisky.

You are home alone.

What do you do?

If your blood is pulsing with testosterone, the chances are that you will reach for the laptop and browse around. You will likely click until you find pixels arranged in such a way that an attractive face and body is convincingly simulated on the screen. This digital body is no doubt in a state of nakedness (or near undress) beckoning you with a come-hither expression. It may also be in the midst of being ravished by another two-dimensional body, playing the role of your proxy. Your eyes drink this image in, as you project yourself into the scene. If your system is more infused with estrogen, however, you are more likely to rely on imagination and memory; projecting erotic visions on the insides of your eyelids (even as there is an increasing chance you might succumb to the Internet’s infamous capacity to provide “porn on tap”).

We all have different libidinal triggers: olive skin, long eyelashes, bangs, freckles, cleavage, ribbons, stiletto heels, stockings, tattoos, abs, beards, and so on, ad infinitum. But the point is that most of these are visual. Given the modern privileging of sight (“seeing is believing”), we tend to neglect, or even forget altogether, that the ear can be one of our most sensitive erogenous zones. Indeed, psychoanalysts tell us that the ear is often the primary source of the libido, given that we are likely to hear things as children that excite and stimulate us. Even if we have no idea what these sounds are, they comprise the sonic gateways through which we enter the erotic realm of egoistic fantasy. As grown-ups, we may find particular voices to be “sexy.” And we certainly tend to find the noises produced by lovers to be a crucial element of arousal, during the torrid bedroom tango. But intriguingly, such sounds have slipped further and further away from our collective consciousness in the twenty-first century, as the Internet has absorbed and replaced previous media forms. Why is this?

Given the erotic power and potential of sound, why are there so few places online that cater to the ear?

Breaking the Power of Monuments

Is a new form of iconoclasm emerging?

by NATALIE CARNES

The Confederate Monument to Robert E. Lee is removed from its perch in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 17, 2017. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In a popular video circulating amidst the national debate over Confederate monuments, protesters chanting, “No KKK, no fascist USA,” throw a yellow rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina and wrench it from a pedestal. The statue twists and crumples as it hits the ground. The crowd cheers. Some come forward to take pictures with the toppled statue, which lay in its position of vanquish until hauled away the next morning.

The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

The iconoclasm in Durham is both new—it speaks to the particular racial anxieties of our present moment—and also familiar. It echoes the French revolutionaries smashing signs of the old regime in their efforts to establish a political order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It echoes, too, the early Protestants breaking, burning, and mocking the images in the Catholic Church that they had renounced. The images that worried early Protestants most were those depicting the divine, for such images, according to their detractors, falsely pretend to bear God’s presence. The Protestants defaced images of Christ to say—to prove—that God is not present in them. God, they insisted, is present everywhere, unbounded by materiality. These iconoclasts, then, broke images both to deny God’s presence and affirm it. A similar dynamic characterizes the iconoclasm of political revolutions. The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.

 

 

Holocaust Memories On Camera

Survivors’ discussions of Schindler’s List variously affirm and challenge its narrative.

by JEFFREY SHANDLER

Over 53,000 Holocaust survivors have filmed their testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. Photo courtesy of the USC Shoah Foundation (used here with permission).

In 1997 I was attending a conference on responses to the Holocaust, when a man raised a provocative suggestion about video interviews of Holocaust survivors. At the time, the USC Shoah Foundation was in the process of making recordings for its Visual History Archive (VHA), now the largest collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, and other organizations had been making similar videos for over a decade. The man commented that a colleague of his had been watching videos of survivors and claimed he could tell what Holocaust histories or novels they had read and what films or television programs they had seen because these works informed the way the survivors told their stories.

These videos reveal how Holocaust survivors have reflected—in some cases, for decades—on what it means to recall this harrowing chapter of their lives.

This claim resonated with an observation I’d made two years earlier. A student told me that her grandmother was a Schindler Jew—that is, she was on the list of Jews Oskar Schindler had rescued from Nazi persecution during World War II. After the film Schindler’s List premiered in 1993, her family persuaded the grandmother to travel with them to Poland to see where she’d grown up and spent the war years. On the trip they made a video, which my student shared with me. I found it especially intriguing at one point, when the family visited the site of the Płaszów labor camp, where the grandmother had been a prisoner. She recalled worrying about being conscripted to work in Schindler’s factory, because every time her circumstances had changed, it had been for the worse. Then one of her sons asked: “That scene in Schindler’s List, when the Jews presented Schindler with a ring—was it really like that?” The grandmother replied that she didn’t know; she wasn’t there when it happened. Her son seemed disappointed and asked another question about the film; then a different relative asked another one. It soon became clear that, for some family members, the grandmother’s story did not stand on its own but was engaged in relation to Schindler’s List—not altogether surprising, given that the film had motivated the family’s trip to Poland to begin with.

Right to Repair is Right to Interpret

As text technologies evolve, so too does the province of literary analysis.

by DENNIS TENEN

Public domain via Pixabay.

How is a tractor like a writing desk?

Some metaphorical insight is to be gained in the comparison between reading and writing, and reaping and sowing. Changes in technology that facilitate physical contact between laborers and their element, be it a blank page or a fallow field, bring farmers and literary scholars into a more direct, non-figurative conversation, concerning the nature of electronic goods.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics.

In the digital world, neither plow nor pen is subject purely to their mechanics. Modern tractors like modern typewriters are also computers, which means that these tools now contain an inward facing surface, marked by inscription. Solid-state memory arrays are machined out of silicon, ceramic, palladium, platinum, silver and other precious metals. They are tiny storehouses for information—programming instructions—which ultimately govern the behavior of the mechanism. The presence of such a surface and the capability to respond to its commands is what differentiates "smart" devices from their lackwit counterparts. The smart device, to paraphrase Marx, is one that evolves, out of its silicon brain, grotesque ideas. It is a thing imbued with potential for symbolic manipulation.

It should not surprise us then that protections usually reserved for intellectual property have been expanded to cover such tangible goods as harvesters and combines. In her essay "Freedom to Tinker," Pamela Samuelson, of Berkeley Law, described the now infamous attempt by John Deere, a major international maker of agricultural machinery, to restrict access to the innards of its machines, thus severely limiting its customers' ability to repair their own equipment. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and repair.org have mobilized politically, resulting in "right to repair" bills adopted into law in at least eleven states, including New York and Massachusetts.

Global Media in the Holy Land

From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.

by MAHA NASSAR

Control room of Arabic-language satellite TV channel. Photo by Deirdre Kline, 2008. Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

Flip through some of the eight hundred or so Arabic satellite television stations available today, and you’ll find many programs that would look quite familiar to American audiences. On the popular MBC 1 station, you can watch Good Morning Arabs and Arab Idol, both of which are produced and hosted in Arabic, but have formats nearly identical to those of their American counterparts. Programming on MBC 4 would look even more familiar, with popular American shows like Project Runway and CBS’s The Talk broadcast in English with Arabic subtitles. The programs’ sidestepping of political sensitivities and frequent product placement exemplify the commercialized, corporatized global media that has come to the Arab world in recent decades.

But there is another type of global media, one with a longer and more interesting history. Long before satellite television and the internet became the primary modes of communication and entertainment in the region, written texts, especially books, newspapers, and journals, were being hand-copied, printed, sold, mailed, and smuggled across geographic and political divides. Far from being commercialized entertainment, this written media was utilized by political organizers and intellectuals to subvert official state narratives, challenge government policies, and connect otherwise isolated peoples to one another.

Unacceptable Persuasion

The nonstop sell in the land of the free.

by MARK BARTHOLOMEW

Facebook reactions. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This May, documents from an internal Facebook report leaked to the press. In the report, Facebook executives boasted of Facebook’s ability to monitor posts and photos in real time to determine what young users are feeling and when. The company claimed that it could identify a host of emotions in its users, including “stressed,” “defeated,” “overwhelmed,” “anxious,” “nervous,” “stupid,” “silly,” “useless,” or feeling like a “failure.” It was implied that such information could be used by eager marketers, for the right price. Facebook initially apologized, admitting that it was wrong to target the emotional susceptibilities of young people. But it quickly backtracked, contending that the report was innocently meant “to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook,” and that the analysis had not been operationalized to actually match ads to teenagers exhibiting these particular frailties.

The ability to accurately target consumers based on their individualized emotional states represents a potential game changer for commercial persuasion.

The leaked report reveals a new front in the longstanding battle between advertisers and consumers. As with many other profitable entities of the new millennium, Facebook’s business model depends on convincing businesses that it offers a new, more effective and efficient means of reaching potential customers. Advertising revenue is the lifeblood that pumps through Facebook’s corporate veins. Advertisers have long tried to capitalize on audience insecurities. Mouthwash and toothpaste makers tell us that our love lives and job prospects hang in the balance if we do not confront the specter of halitosis. Super Bowl ads feature cute babies, triggering concerns about the safety of our children to the benefit of tire makers and life insurance companies. But the ability to accurately target consumers based on their individualized emotional states represents a potential game changer for commercial persuasion.

Adcreep » mounts a damning critique of the modern American legal system's failure to stem the flow of invasive advertising.

Emotional segmenting is just one new strategy employed by advertisers today. Location-tracking technologies shadow shoppers, enabling the delivery of ads at critical moments. A thriving marketplace for celebrity selling on social media leverages the sociality and seeming spontaneity of Twitter and Instagram to camouflage the mercenary motives of brand spokespersons. Meanwhile market research is increasingly turning away from the conscious dialogue of focus group interviews, instead using neuroscience to measure our unconscious, involuntary biological responses to products and advertising.

Emerging tactics of commercial persuasion, from algorithms to consumer surveillance, may yield strong returns for marketers, but they show little respect for human autonomy. This raises the question, how should the law deal with marketing innovations that threaten to upset the balance of power between advertisers and consumers? This is a difficult question, but reformers do not need to start from scratch: A sophisticated legal apparatus already exists to balance commercial freedom with consumer protection. In trying to understand the law’s response to the marketing technologies of today, I examined a century of skirmishes between advertisers, consumers, and legal actors in the United States. These battles over marketing innovation have created a sprawling ecosystem of laws and governmental and private regulators.

Modern Iran in 8 Songs

From classical melodies to rap, Iran’s music reveals its long struggle for political freedom.

by NAHID SIAMDOUST

Public domain via Pixabay.

 

Soundtrack of the Revolution » offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change to provide an alternative history of the Islamic Republic.

Music was one of the first casualties of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini decreed early on that music was “opium for the masses” and so it was banned in 1979. But music has deep roots in Iranian culture and quickly crept back into public life. Indeed, in the absence of a free official public sphere, music has offered one of the most important vehicles for political expression in the face of government repression, creating a channel of mass communication that has transformed public culture within the limits of an authoritarian state. At the same time, Iranian music tells the story of the evolution of the state itself, from a severe republic of mourning to one that allows for a certain type of controlled fun. Now more than thirty-five years on from the revolution, both the children of the revolution and their music have come of age and the art they have produced offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change. Taken together, the eight songs below shed light on issues at the heart of debates in Iran—about its future and identity, the quest for political freedom, and changing notions of religiosity.