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The Iranian Studies Initiative at UCSB and Farhang Foundation invite you to

Molla Nasreddin of Tiflis and the Diasporic Milieu that Gave Birth to It

a free live lecture event by Dr. Janet Afary - UC Santa Barbara

This event is a part of a lecture series on
Iranian Art and Literary Exchange Between Iran, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia in the 20th Century.
This series is co-organized by the Graduate Center for Literary Research, University of California, Santa Barbara and with the support of the Gramian-Emrani Foundation and Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Funds. 

In 1906 a group of Muslim Azerbaijani and Georgian artists and intellectuals of Tbilisi (modern Georgia) published the periodical Mollā Nasreddin. Their journal reinterpreted the tales of the Middle Eastern trickster by the same name to construct a progressive anti-colonial discourse with a strong emphasis on social, political, gender, and religious reform. Using folklore, visual art, and satire, their eight-to twelve-page weekly, which had full-page lithographic cartoons in colour, reached tens of thousands of people across the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation.

The editor Jalil Mamedqolizadeh, and several writers grew up in Azerbaijani-speaking Shi’i communities of South Caucasus with strong affinities to Iran. Several contributors traveled regularly to Iran to visit, to start new businesses, or occasionally to flee from dire political situations in the Russian Empire. Hence it is possible to think of the journal as a transnational diasporic journal that was heavily influenced by Iranian cultural and social practices. Like many other diasporans, the writers felt torn between their close religious, cultural, and ethnic bonds to Iran, their desire to assert their Azerbaijani language and cultural heritage, and the need to further assimilate within the greater Russian society to succeed professionally. This feeling of in-betweenness, of wanting so deeply and passionately to belong to one place or the other, and yet finding that there really was no one place where one could find oneself “at home”, vividly comes through in many columns, poems, and graphics.

About Dr. Janet Afary

Janet Afary holds the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a Professor of Religious Studies. Her books include: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2009, winner of the British Society for Middle East Studies Annual Book Prize); The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (Columbia University Press, 1996, winner of Dehkhoda Institute Book Awardj; and (with Kevin B. Anderson) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005, winner of the Latifeh Yarshater Book Award for Iranian Women’s Studies); (with John R. Perry) Charand-o Parand: Revolutionary Satire in Iran (Yale University Press, 2016), Honorable Mention Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. Her forthcoming book (with Kamran Afary) is Mollā Nasreddin: The Remaking of a Modern Trickster (Edinburgh UP, 2022).