Reddit reviews Imagining Iran: The Tragedy of Subaltern Nationalism

I personally admire Reza Khan and recognize his achievements in creating the modern nation of Iran, so we have no disagreements there.


The issue with Reza Khan which worsened with his son, was that at their core, they were ashamed of Iranians. Their motivation for everything they achieved was the thought that Iranians were weaker, lesser, and generally inferior to Europeans so they strived to make them more like the Europeans. This made them lose sight of their priorities and pursue things that the ordinary Iranian didn't identify with, because they did not identify with Iranians.


These two passages are from Imagining Iran: The Tragedy of Subaltern Nationalism:


> [Alam-e Nesvan] also published essays, training women in sewing techniques on newly imported sewing machines, and advised them how to be moderate in spending money on fashion. In these absurd displays of modernity, Reza Shah's two daughters, Shams and Ashraf, performed as role models for being modern and fashionable. But such concerns were not relevant for most Iranian women at the time.

> Not having running water in most homes was a major struggle for most women in Iran in the early decades of the 1900s, during which women gathered around the nearest local water sources, usually a small stream running through each neighborhood, to do their washing--a time-consuming job, to say the least. Additionally, women were responsible for carrying drinking water from local water houses, usually in open containers on their heads--a back breaking job. Women were also in charge of preparing food, which had to be purchased, gathered, and picked from various local sources on a daily basis--a necessary job for sustaining family life. In contrast the national concern for the state's elites was to look Western.


And, from one of Reza Shah's retired ministers, Hedayat Mukhber Saltane:


> In a meeting, the shah lifted my hat and asked, "What do you think now?" [referring to his latest civilizing attempt by changing the previously mandated hat referred to as the Pahlavi cap to the newly mandated brimmed ones], to which I responded, "The Pahlavi cap had a better name." Agitated, his majesty stepped back retorting "All I am trying to do is for us to look like them [European] so they [Westerners] would not ridicule us." To which I replied, "And, of course, this has been a thoughtful consideration of yours." Then, I said to myself, why [Westerners] ridicule us is because of what is under our hats (minds) which show our perverted emulation of them.


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> Pictures you show were in the 1940-1950s, which was in the middle of this change. This is important because Iran by the late 1970s was nothing like this anymore


So it's clear that you didn't even look through the album or read the title of this post. I posted pictures from 1952, 10 years into the SECOND Pahlavi's reign and the worst depictions of poverty are the 1977 photos of the slums of Tehran.


In fact, the last picture is from 1979. The caption talks about how a Kurdish village was still undeveloped 26 years after the Shah's White Revolution.