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Description
Tracing dissent in a repressive political and social environment is an attempt to elucidate with some degree of certainty that which is ambiguous by design. In this thesis, I examine Iranian dissent through primarily musical texts to uncover the rhetorical mechanisms it deploys to evade suppression and to infiltrate the public domain. I explore dissent by reviewing the history, dominant narratives, and cultural tropes that form the semiotic field through which alternative discourses engage with the dominant discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran. My project examines the space at the intersection of power and rhetoric through songs of protest in a contested discourse about Iranian identity, guided by the binary of modernity and tradition, which I argue is the contested space at the heart of Iranian public discourse. I analyze rhetorical, semiotic, and performative texts that constitute coded dissent’s entrance into the public space, concentrating on musical texts and songs of protest. I base my examination of the distribution of power in the public sphere on Michel Foucault’s interpretation of authority as the pervasive gaze of surveillance, James Scott’s framework of discourse as distinct public and hidden transcripts, and Assef Bayat’s reframing of the notion of resistance as social nonmovements. I settle on a four-tiered classification of these findings: the weaponizing of ethos; adaptations of protected symbols and spaces; misappropriation of authorized codes; and speaking through absence. I find evidence of an unrelenting tradition of dissent through social nonmovements and rhetorical invention that compensates for its diminished democratic agency with a confounding capacity to manifest and exercise power. I conclude that any serious examination of the Iranian pu lic domain must consider the subversive discourse of what Scott calls the hidden transcript.
