Race, Gender, and Patriotic Performance in Simin Daneshvar’s Modernist Fiction

This chapter pays close attention to two stories from Simin Daneshvar’s 1961 collection Shahri Chun Behesht (A City Like Paradise), reading “Vakil Bazaar” and “The Playhouse” as modernist “rehearsals” of racist archetypes, representing a literary-historical moment when socially progressive Iranian writers were just starting to situate their work within global discourses of antiracism and contending with problematic historical legacies in theater and narrative. Briefly summarized, the chapter takes into account, first, a “child-snatcher” character accused of Jewish blood libel against Muslims (associated by the child narrator with both her lower-class nanny and with the self-flagellation of Ashura), and second, an actor whose blackface performance signifies lowbrow humor and a lack of inhibitions. Ostby examines these isolated incidents in Daneshvar as a kind of prism onto a larger modernist moment, marked by socialist class struggle and women’s rights initiatives, but also racial purity discourse. Her readings trace where uses of metaphor and allegory we might consider “modernist” aesthetics in Daneshvar’s work obscure or even actively prevent the social critique associated with “modernist” politics.