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The Latifeh Yarshater Bood Award 2012

Prix Latifeh Yarshater 2012 pour Farzaneh Milani

mercredi 7 août 2013, par Collectif LP


The Latifeh Yarshater Bood Award 2012

the Latifeh Yarshater Award Committee has unanimously chosen Farzaneh Milani’s Words, Not Swords : Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement and Kamran Talattof’s Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran : the Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist, both published by the University of Syracuse Press in 2011, as joint recepients of the 2012 award.

In conferring the award, the committee praised Farzaneh Milani’s Words, Not Swords : Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement for its outstanding contribution to women’s human rights through Iranian women’s literary life, by elucidating their evolving creativity and, especially their articulation of new critical sensibilities. The committee noted with appreciation the book’s vast coverage of the cultural geography of Iran’s literature and art, from poetry, fiction, biography, and autobiography to cinema and religious text. The theme of freedom of movement running through the work, encompassing not only the oft repeated need for women to have, in Virginia Wolf’s words “a room of their own,” but also “the freedom to leave it and return to it at will,” is fundamental to understanding the oppression Iranian women experience daily, as well as the significance of their resistance against and their engagement with the structures of power in Iran. The book is elegantly written and copiously researched.

In conferring the award on Kamran Talattof’s Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran : the Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist, the committee noted with appreciation the originality of the treatment of the theme of sexuality and its role in shaping, promoting, or hindering modernity in Iran. By focusing mainly on the life of one woman, Talattof creates a lively and thought provoking discussion of certain major political, social and cultural trends in modern Iran through finding the intersections between Shahrzad’s personal and public life and placing it within modern Iran’s past and present, its elite and popular cultures, thereby illuminating the central role played by what Talattof calls the tension between “Iranian modernity and traditional sexuality” in defining Iranian society. The author takes a refreshing approach to sexuality in popular culture, especially “film farsi,” as well as the negative and basically misogynist reaction of the majority of the intellectual elite against display of sexuality. He does not merely theorize these issues, nor does he try to fit reality of Shahrzad’s life into his own preconceived notions ; rather he draws his theoretical conclusions from Shahrzad’s own life from childhood to present. The book is well researched and finely articulated.

Mahnaz Afkhami,

Chair

Committee on the Latifeh Yarshater Award


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