Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East: Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran (PDF)

Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran investigates
the ways in which Armenian minorities in Iran encountered Iranian nationalism
and participated in its development over the course of the twentieth
century. Based primarily on oral interviews, archival documents, personal
memoirs, memorabilia, and photographs, the book examines the lives of a
group of Armenian-Iranians—a truck driver, an army officer, a parliamentary
representative, a civil servant, and a scout leader—and explores the
personal conflicts and paradoxes attendant upon their layered allegiances
and compound identities. In documenting individual experiences in Iranian
industry, military, government, education, and community organization,
the five social biographies detail the various roles of elites and non-elites
in the development of Iranian nationalism and reveal the multiple forces
that shape the processes of identity formation. Yaghoubian combines these
portraits with theories of nationalism and national identity to answer recurring
pivotal questions about how nationalism evolves, why it is appealing,
what broad forces and daily activities shape and sustain it, and the role of
ethnicity in its development.