A Contested Collective; monumental public spaces and the politics of memory in Iran

Invented Tradition as a Theoretical Approach Within Iranian Memory Studies: A Review

“…Memory is a "technical term," but a more deliberate attempt is in play to not take it as a term in the margin but as a term in the center of the research with denotation exceeding the one limitedly used within traditional fields. Research by Soroushfar (2016), Rasouli and Nematollah (2019), Zokaei and Vaala (2019), and Shamin (2022) represents this group in the present review. These studies are published within a few years; the more Iranian memory literature gets influenced by the global interdisciplinary trend within the memory studies, the more consciously it will develop as social memory research on its own, and the more rapidly it will broaden the range of this third group.…”

“…Soroushfar’s paper is not the only research addressing the politics of memory through the lens of the recent paradigm or symbolic interactionism. Golrokh Shamim’s research (2022) is another example that falls within this study category. The two studies, categorized thematically within the paradigm of social interactionism, theorize the politics of memory constructed as individual Iranians and come together in their daily social life to give sense to what is remembered as memory and heritage of the past.…”

“…In the review, another cluster of literature exists, although proportionally thin, completely broke up the above-mentioned thematic setup. Two papers are classified as research that could be suited to this group, namely the one written by Zohreh Soroushfar et al (2019) and the one by Golrokh Shamin (2022). Table 7 illustrates a thematic analysis related to this group of research.…”