Extraterritoriality, Nationality, and Empire in the Persianate World, 1890-1940

Extraterritoriality and nationality were crucial to the legal landscape of the Late Persianate world and relations between Iran and British India. Extraterritoriality not only protected British subjects from Persian prosecution but also afforded the British Empire the means to rule Indians in lands beyond the Raj. Iran’s opposition to extraterritoriality led to laws that expanded Iranian nationality to include many Indians living in Iran and the Iranian diaspora living in India—who often navigated these rules as it best suited their interests. These developments reveal the significance of imperialism and state building to the emergence of modern international law and the fate of the Persianate world.

Review of Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California Iranian Pop Music by Farzaneh Hemmasi (Duke Press)

Tehrangeles Dreaming is the first book about the Tehrangeles music industry, that is, the Iranian diaspora music industry brought to life by the expatriate Iranian artists and music producers who settled in Los Angeles and Southern California after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Farzaneh Hemmasi uses an ethnographic approach in combination with an analysis of diaspora media discourse in order to “examine expatriate imaginations of influence on, and intimacy with, their global Iranian audiences” (26). At its core, the book deals with the imagining and reimagining of Iranian identity by the artistic community that creates music and media content for Iranians in Iran and across the world.

The “Brilliant Teaching”: Iranian Christians in Tang China and Their Identity

The last three decades or so have seen an increasing interest in the early history of Christianity in China, particularly in Christian communities in the Tang period. One of the pertinent questions asked—particularly by theologians—is whether the “Brilliant Teaching” (Jingjiao), as the religion called itself in Chinese, had a substantial number of Chinese converts, i.e. whether it was a proselytizing religion or rather an Iranian diaspora religion. While recent documents and new interpretations of existing sources has made it probable that we are indeed dealing with an “expat” religious community, the question of the cultural and religious identity of this community has not really been addressed: they were using Syriac as their liturgical and communal language, but were Persian, Sogdian and maybe even Bactrian in terms of origin and culture. This paper will summarize the data we can get from Chinese sources and discuss them in the light of religious and cultural identity.