Identity Politics: A survey on the Absence of Tehran in the First Pahlavi Drama

With the coming to power of Reza Khan and the establishment of the Pahlavi government with the model of the nation-state, major changes took place in the government’s policies. Including the establishment of identity politics that sought to create a unified nationality for Iranian society. Until then, and especially during the Constitutional Revolution, identity was not a national and unified discourse; that was the product of irrelevant and fragmented discourses such as politics movements, immature individuals, tradition, religion, etc. The institution of literature also reacted to this identity politics. In identity reflecting, Persian drama in the Pahlavi period underwent a fundamental shift compared to Constitutional drama. One of the concepts used in identity politics and nationalism, which played an important role in Persian (Pahlavi) drama, is the place/space. One of the important examples of this place is Tehran. The important chronotope that -with the emergence and consistency of the first Pahlavi drama under the domination of the identity politics, genre, and the government’s new approach to history- suddenly disappeared. We encounter the representation of the city of Tehran in the first Pahlavi drama is practically the representation of absence. The reasons for this concealment of Tehran / City are clarified in a comparative analogy with the Constitutional era. We observe how identity politics works and influences the concept of place. Thus, the favorite place/ space of the Constitutional drama -which had phenomenological characteristics-, changed its nature to the constructive and symbolic place of the nation-state in the works of this period.