ABSTRACT
Twentieth and twenty-first century productions of Iranian culture, high and low, reveal the precarious balance between inferiority and pride. The creative possibilities thus unmoored can spin out of control, as in the fanciful fabrications of Pezeshkzad's fictional character, Mashallah Khan, and those of the reigning monarch who believed his own performances of modern Iranian culture. The apparent arbitrariness of the changing cultural paradigms is also captured in the song 'Q. Q. Bang Bang', but, unlike Pezeshkzad's novel, the song reveals the risk of the imaginative and the performative becoming all too real. What begins as staged battles in children's games quickly transforms into rigid oppositions. The impulse to distill and purify a national culture has only generated counter-definitions rooted in equally limiting and illusory constructs of culture. The attempt to align modern Iran with its pre-Islamic legacy produced an equally exclusionary practice of defining Iran as uniformly Islamic.
