Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed

Examines the continuity between a people’s ancient mythologies and their contemporary aesthetic tastes

• Offers a provocative retrieval of the ancient Iranian myth of creation to enable a fresh new way of looking at contemporary art and culture
• Critically reflects on how cultural continuities and civilizational endurance defy, overcome and correct the course of history and the logic of chronological periodisation
• Provides a detailed study of contemporary Iranian visual and performing arts with reference to their global context, exploring themes of gender and sexuality, self and society, home and exile, solitude and liberation, mysticism and philosophy
• Explores the world of Iranian film, fiction, poetry and drama as the wellspring of modern mythologies of selfhood and personhood rooted in hidden and unexplored subterranean visions of an alterity we have not yet assayed
• Examines the ways in which the ancient Iranian myth of creation resurface in contemporary film, fiction, and poetry, as metonymic allusions that accommodate to overcome a politics of despair

What if all we see, read, feel, fear, desire and repress in contemporary film, fiction and poetry are metonymic substitutes for much older and more ancient mythologies? What if our modern mythologies are not actually that modern?

Using Iran as an example of an ancient civilization with a sustained course of continuity all the way to the present time, this book moves towards a philosophical reflection on the relationship between what we see and feel today when engaging with art, literature and film and what we have otherwise deeply buried in the forgotten layers of our collective consciousness from time immemorial.

This is the story of Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed, an exploration of when and where ancient myths become metonymic in varied forms of contemporary cultural and aesthetic representations.