Playing with Fire [EVENT]
Playing with Fire: Iran, Ethnography, and the Question of Genre
Thursday, October 19, 2017
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
2 West 13th Street, Room M101 (The Bark Room)
Join us for a talk with writer, artist, filmmaker and anthropologist Roxanne Varzi, connecting fieldwork under conditions of political censorship to the self-censorship that academia sometimes seems to demand.
Professor Varzi’s work consistently politicizes the question of the form and genre that research takes. Her book Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran (2015) combines ethnography with fiction in order to explore how Tehrani youth literally and figuratively play with fire as a form of underground political theater. Her film, Plastic Flowers Never Die (2008), is an experimental documentary and meditation on mourning and the aftermath of war in post-Revolution public culture in Iran. From writing fiction to working increasingly in film, Varzi finds both a sense of freedom in genre-bending and a responsibility to her field research in searching for the most suitable forms of engagement and representation. In this talk, she will discuss the multi-modal ethnographies her research explores, her struggles with censorship and self-censorship, and the kinds of decisions she has made in moving toward less typical ethnographic genres like film and fiction.
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Roxanne Varzi is a writer, artist, filmmaker and anthropologist. She was Born in Iran to an American mother and Iranian father and migrated to the U.S shortly after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. In 1991 while on a year abroad at the American University in Cairo she returned to Iran for a short visit and found a country vibrantly alive with an exciting underground public culture. That short trip inspired her to return to Iran and live there for a year beginning a long set of journeys to Iran, the most recent of which was with her husband and three-year-old son who attended preschool there.
Varzi is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Film and Media Studies, Persian Studies and Religious Studies. She has a Ph.D. in Social Cultural Anthropology from Columbia. She was the recipient of the first Fulbright to Iran since the Revolution, and the youngest Distinguished Senior Iranian Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. She has also held a Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellowship at New York University and a Markle Foundation New Media Fellow, at the Centre for Law, Media and Society, Wolfson College, Oxford University and sabbatical fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg/EUME and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (The Center for Advanced Studies) in Berlin and at the IFK in Vienna, Austria.
Her writing has been published in The Annals of Political and Social Science, Feminist Review, Public Culture, American Anthropologist, Eastern Art Report and the London Review of Books. She has been quoted in the LA Times, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher. Her short stories have appeared in two anthologies of Iranian-American writing as well as The New York Press and in Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly for which she won a Short Story Award for Fiction.
She is the author of two books: Warring Souls: Media, Martyrdom and Youth in post-Revolution Iran, Duke University Press, 2006 and 2016 Independent Publishers Gold Medal Award-winning Novel Last Scene Underground: An ethnographic novel of Iran by Stanford University Press. Her film, Plastic Flowers Never Die, 2009 is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and has been shown in Festivals all over the world. Her sound installation Whole World Blind premiered at Soundwalk in Long Beach, and was installed in Berlin, Paris, Philadelphia, San Francisco and is featured permanently at Publicbooks.org.
Her most recent work is a video Installation entitled Salton Sublime about finding the sublime among environmental degradation premiered in Berlin Germany in 2017. She is at work on her second Documentary and her first play.